Have you ever felt like your nonprofit grant budget has a slow leak you can’t find?
One month it’s a sudden per-seat price hike on your donor CRM. The next, it’s mandatory platform transaction fees on your donation forms. Before you know it, half your funding is going toward software renewals instead of your mission.
In the spirit of Chris Kohler’s How They Get You, let’s pull back the curtain on how enterprise vendors rig the system for small organizations.
1. The Salesforce NPSP Bait-and-Switch
For years, Salesforce told nonprofits that the Nonprofit Success Pack (NPSP) was their digital home[cite: 41]. Grassroots orgs trained staff for months to become certified admins.
Then came the pivot: sunsetting NPSP in favor of high-tier enterprise cloud bundles. Suddenly, organizations were told their current setup was deprecated, forcing expensive migrations and punishing licensing fees that hit small-budget teams the hardest[cite: 41].
The Rule: If a tech vendor gives you free training for an ecosystem you don’t own, you aren’t the customer—you’re the unpaid sales force.
2. Transaction Tax and Hidden Add-ons
Payment processors and donor platforms like Classy built their growth on extracting a percentage of every act of generosity. When platforms add mandatory processing surcharges or hide maintenance fees in fine print, they siphon funds away from community impact.
3. How to Fight Back: Go AFK
You don’t need a $50k enterprise consulting budget to run a modern organization.
- Own it, don’t lease it: Deploy open-source tools like Twenty CRM and n8n on local hardware or self-hosted virtual private servers.
- Audit your stack: Cancel auto-renewing subscriptions that lock your donor data behind paywalls.
- Use what you have: An old PC with 8GB of RAM running local Ollama AI models can handle grant drafting and intake automation for zero monthly dollars.
True nonprofit tech is free if you’re willing to learn how to run it. Log off their cloud. Log in to yours.