Choosing the Right Crowdfunding Platform in 2025: A Complete Analysis (for filmmakers and artists)

Things can change fast in the crowdfunding world. I should know; I was the Manager for Creator Success at Seed&Spark for 4 years, during which time I personally advised over $25,000,000 in launched campaigns to the tune of an 85% success rate. Every one of those campaigns was different; different challenges, different audiences, different needs out of a crowdfunding platform. Today, we’re specifically looking at the top four options: Kickstarter, IndieGoGo, Seed&Spark, and GoFundMe.

Platform isn’t everything, but it’s a lot, so here we are. Let’s choose one that’s right for you.

Fees

Almost no early crowdfunder considers fees, which I know because I’ve fielded quite a few customer complaints at various times when they realized their final payout looked a little different from what their main campaign page showed to supporters. But it’s a reality of the space: fundraising platforms aren’t doing this for free, their payment processor isn’t doing this for free, and if you want a nice-looking UI to fundraise (versus posting your Venmo username on social media), you can’t really begrudge them for it. So do your math ahead of time and don’t get taken by surprise.

Every major crowdfunding platform I’ll be talking about today uses Stripe as a payment processor in order to accept credit cards. So in addition to the platform fees of the website itself, you’re also looking at the following ones:

3% + $0.20 per pledge
Pledges under $10 have a discounted micro-pledge fee of 5% + $0.05 per pledge

No platform that I’ll mention today charges a fee for a campaign that doesn’t reach its goal, as long as you’re using a platform where you have a time-locked goal to hit. If you don’t raise your funds, no one’s credit card is charged and no fee is due. Crowdfunding campaigns do not charge credit cards at the time of pledge, they place a hold on a credit card and then charge it if the necessary conditions are met.

Kickstarter

Fee: 5% of your final raise, as long as you raise at least 100% of your stated goal. No optional tip. We’ll come back to what that means in a minute.

IndieGoGo

Fee: 5% final raise, plus optional tip, whether using flexible or fixed campaign. This is a new policy; previously, they charged a higher fee for flexible campaigns that didn’t hit 100% of their goal, which I’ve always thought was unnecessarily predatory so I’m glad they made this switch!

IndieGoGo also has what’s called InDemand, to allow campaigns that hit their goal by their deadline to continue fundraising after their campaign officially ends. The fee for that is 5% again if your initial campaign was on IndieGoGo, otherwise it’s 8%, with a 15% (total) fee on any funds driven by Indiegogo’s platform channels.

Seed&Spark

Fee: No platform fee, optional tip.

GoFundMe

Fee: No platform fee, optional tip.

Tips: a predatory case of UI design

At the time of writing, Seed&Spark, IndieGoGo, and GoFundMe all give the person pledging money the option to leave a tip. It’s so important that you understand this: the tip is for the platform, not the creator/campaigner. In all cases, you can give $0 as a tip, but all of them auto-fill that area with an amount and you have to manually enter $0. It’s opt-out, not opt-in. Let me show you.

GoFundMe

I have to say: I like GoFundMe’s new tip UI best, and GoFundMe is also the only platform here that I think maybe has a fair case for collecting tips considering most of their campaigns are for disaster relief and healthcare and charitable causes, and it would be weirder if they automatically charged a platform fee across the board. I like that the tip only auto-fills after you’ve entered an amount, and you can immediately drag the tip to $0 without clicking to a new screen or typing anything.

IndieGoGo

This one was new to me: I have no idea when IGG added a tip dropdown, but I hate it! I hate it, because it auto-fills $5, and you have to select “other amount” and then manually enter $0. The dropdown menu appears as if you must select a tip amount, and for people who aren’t tech savvy, and even some who are, it conditions them to leave a tip as a result. It makes it look like there’s no other option, because most people don’t consider $0 an “amount.” People who build tech and websites understand that the path of least resistance is how most users approach their products, and if you make giving a company less money difficult, many will just accept it.

Also, while I appreciate they label the tip as “IndieGoGo Tip,” I can make an educated guess that most people don’t instantly understand that means you’re tipping a website. It could just mean you’re leaving a tip on IndieGoGo, the website. This ambiguity is often by design.

Seed&Spark

This doesn’t look so bad at first. I like that they clarify what they use the tip for, with links and everything, and they phrase it as “Tip to Seed&Spark.”

However. I just showed you the tip UI. I didn’t show it to you in context of the web page where it exists. Here’s that:

Notice anything? This is the screenshot I took of the entire screen when I got to the pledge summary. I can only access the tip UI pictured above if I scroll down. But why would I scroll down? The button to proceed to payment is right there, already lit up and ready for me to move on. And the “tip” isn’t even labeled like it is on IndieGoGo as “Seed&Spark Tip” or something. It just says “tip.” This is what I mean by predatory UI (user interface) design.

How do I get my money?

Kickstarter

By raising 100% or more of your crowdfunding goal (and yes, you can raise more than 100%, it would be insane to not allow you to raise more money, I don’t know why people ask this question, which they do frequently). All or nothing, baby.

IndieGoGo

If you’re running a fixed campaign, it’s all or nothing, baby. If you’re running a flexible campaign, you keep what you raise, no matter what. Don’t do the latter, though. You also can’t opt into InDemand if you don’t hit your goal, even if you’re using a flexible campaign. Which, again, don’t.

Seed&Spark

By raising at least 80% of your goal, 40% of which can be made up of what Seed&Spark refers to as loans. We’ll come back to this in the Quirks section.

GoFundMe

Keep whatever you raise, withdraw at any time, even multiple times over the course of the fundraiser. Withdrawals can take 2–5 business days.

Platform Quirks

The non-monetary unique elements that define each of these platforms from one another.

Kickstarter

• Projects Only. From their website: “Kickstarter can be used to create all sorts of things: art and gadgets, events and spaces, ideas and experiences. But every project needs a plan for creating something and sharing it with the world.” Emphasis mine. Essentially… you can’t crowdfund for your rent or a medical procedure, but if you’re making something, be it a tangible product, a digital product, or an experience/event, you’re all groovy.
• Add-Ons. Kickstarter added this feature semi-recently, to help make multiple reward selections more efficient. For campaigns I’ve helped run, we’ve raised an average of $25 more per pledge just by using add-ons, since Kickstarter only allows you to pledge once per campaign, and therefore if you have a few reward levels that don’t get included at other support levels, this is a good way of nudging people to give a bit more for something fun. My one complaint with Add-Ons, though, is that if you’re using them to encourage pledges to existing reward tiers with a limited stock, they don’t share a stock. What I mean is that if you have a limited availability offer, like 10 signed posters, and make it both a regular reward and an add-on reward, either you have to be exceptionally vigilant about ending your add-on and solo reward as soon as the combined numbers from your add-on and full reward make up your limited offer (so 3 add-ons sold and 7 solo rewards, as an example), or you should only include unlimited rewards as add-ons.

IndieGoGo

• Open for most crowdfunding needs. You can run a campaign on IndieGoGo for: for-profit campaigns, campaigns benefitting nonprofit organizations or nonprofit beneficiaries, campaigns for products, anything within “Community Projects”, and educational campaigns in the Tech and Innovation category. This is fairly broad, so you’re probably groovy if you want to fundraise for most things.
• Flexible Funding. IndieGoGo’s primary quirk is so primary that most people assume it’s the only option: you can keep what you raise, regardless of your goal. While you have always been able to do a fixed funding (all or nothing) campaign with them, if you were gonna do that… you were going to Kickstarter instead. So if you don’t want people to assume you’re using flexible funding, go to Kickstarter.
• InDemand. As mentioned before, InDemand allows campaigns that hit their goal by their deadline to continue fundraising. This is the only platform on this list that allows you to extend your fundraising on the same link beyond your initial campaign deadline, rather than making you make a new campaign altogether. This is not necessarily a good thing, but I’m glad you can only opt-in if you hit your goal. Ahem. I’m very curious how this works if you come from another platform to opt-in. Have you done that? Send me an email!

Seed&Spark

• Artists Only. For a long time, Seed&Spark was exclusive to filmmakers and filmmaker organizations. In early 2020, they shifted to allowing campaigns from artists and artist-support orgs of all kinds, so while it’s still fairly narrow who can crowdfund with them, it’s less narrow than it was.
• Wish List. While Seed&Spark has all the normal hallmarks of a crowdfunding campaign page— pitch video, rewards/incentives, story (the main text area)— it also has what they call their Wish List. This is how you set your fundraising goal on Seed&Spark, to encourage more transparency between the creator and the audience, but also to encourage people either pledging money to particular aspects of the budget OR to propose loans. Click the link to learn more (about loans as well). While the wish list can be used creatively, and I’ve had a lot of fun with it in the past, 90% of pledgers completely ignore this tab, which makes it fairly pointless and frustrating to use unless you have a particularly unique way to utilize it in your marketing.
• Loans. Facilitated by the Wish List, in theory, loans are proposed by supporters and approved and valued by the creator. They are in-kind offers rather than financial contributions, things like discounted or free labor, access to locations, or props/wardrobe items. The monetary value of the loan does not have to equal the entire wish list item, and it is set by the creator, and the value set by any accepted loans does affect the total funded meter- 40% of your total goal can be made up of loans, which are rarely if ever audited by the platform.
• Feedback. Though all the platforms we’re discussing today have some kind of approval process for legal reasons prior to launch, Seed&Spark is the only platform that offers actual back and forth feedback, for free, to all campaigns, that requires one of their employees manually approving your campaign for launch, only AFTER you have implemented that feedback. However, Seed&Spark has been subject to a number of layoffs in their crowdfunding specialist department, so the people now giving feedback have not all been trained as feedback specialists, leading to much of this recent feedback being less personalized with occasionally longer wait times. Relatedly, I have a one-day-turnaround, cost-effective crowdfunding feedback package you can purchase that’s highly personalized.
• Emails. I add this only because I’m frequently irritated by (though I understand) Kickstarter’s pledge list. On Seed&Spark, as soon as someone makes a pledge, you get access to their email. On Kickstarter, you only get their emails once the campaign closes successfully. This is meant to be so that you can only directly communicate to people through the platform’s messaging/update system until such time as the campaign raises its funds, and I get that. I do. But it makes support [without looping in the platform] nearly impossible, because on Kickstarter all you get is their display name, which might be Sam S. And if you’ve got more Sam S’s in your community, and both claim to have donated but only one Sam S appears on your list… you can’t help the correct one ensure they’ve donated correctly. It also makes it harder to keep track of who you’ve emailed who’s given money, if they aren’t using their unique first and last name as their display name, so you might end up sending follow ups to people who’ve already given you money, which is not a good look, and most people don’t realize you genuinely can’t tell who they are from the scarce information provided pre-campaign-closure.

GoFundMe

• Crowdfund for basically anything. This, along with the flexible, ongoing fundraising function, is why you go to GoFundMe, because there aren’t really rules. If you need money and a way to easily display why, GoFundMe is your go-to.
• There was a CollegeHumor video about it once. This counts as a quirk. It’s a great video.

So which should I use?

My go-to recommendation these days is Kickstarter. It has the best reputation overall psychologically because it’s always been exclusively all-or-nothing, it has a functional and ever-improving website that’s easy to use and easy to communicate with for support reasons, and it’s the most familiar to pledgers (it’s near Google-level in language- “doing a Kickstarter” is almost as common as “doing a crowdfunding campaign”). Familiarity isn’t everything, but clean UI is. They also don’t try to trick your pledgers into tipping them, which is big in my book.

I categorically do not recommend GoFundMe for creative projects- everything about it works against you if you aren’t fundraising for personal or nonprofit reasons. It is, however, the backbone of the American healthcare system. Late stage capitalism is working as expected, folks!

IndieGoGo has made a lot of changes and improvements recently, but I still don’t really recommend them because of their reputation/psychological baggage for pledgers as the flexible non-GoFundMe platform (and flexible funding is bad). It looks like they’re prioritizing tech and products in a whole new way, though, with a separate shop/marketplace where people can purchase items created through crowdfunding campaigns, so that might be a cool partnership if you’re that sort of crowdfunder.

Seed&Spark has less baggage psychologically than IndieGoGo because they aren’t technically a flexible fundraising platform. Despite their hard 80% funded line to recieve your funds, there’s less risk if you don’t hit the heights you hoped because of how you can use their loans system to offset your goal a bit. I have had, personally, and been personally reached out to about, a number of technical concerns with their website, which is something else to keep in mind. I recommend Seed&Spark for college students and brand new folks who can’t afford someone like me and just need advice… but no one said you can’t get their feedback and then launch with that in mind on a different platform afterwards.

Did I miss something? Did something change since the writing of this article? Do you have an experience with one of these platforms you want to share with other fundraisers? Shoot me an email (brianna.castellini@gmail.com) and I’ll do my best to keep this post updated… at least until 2026, when I’ll write a new one ;)

Bri Castellini is an independent filmmaker, a romance author, and, regrettably, a podcaster. She’s known for the 2017 short film Ace and Anxious (writer/director, 165k+ views on YouTube) and for her podcasts Burn, Noticed and Breaking Out of Breaking In, covering the USA television show Burn Notice and practical filmmaking advice, respectively. She can lick her elbow (not clickbait). Full work history and ways to hire her as a consultant can be found on her website BriCastellini.com