This page exists to provide full visibility into how Give Freely operates.
Our mission is to help people generate free donations for charities by shopping online. Below, we outline our revenue model, financial reporting, donation distribution process, handling of personal information, affiliate policies, and overall mission.
How it Works (Revenue model):
When a user shops at one of 15,000+ online partner stores, the store pays us an affiliate commission (typically 1-15% of the purchase amount - the average is 2-3%). 100% of what Give Freely gets paid in affiliate commissions goes to charity. For partner extensions, Give Freely pays a small partner fee out of founder-provided funds in appreciation of being included in that partner extension. Give Freely also covers the cost of disbursing the funds to various charities, so in all cases, 100% of what we receive from affiliate commissions goes to the charities that are selected.
How Much is Raised (Financial Reporting):
As of 01/29/2026 Give Freely has paid out $338,571 to various charities. Because operating expenses are paid separately by the company, these figures represent the full amount of affiliate commissions received and donated.
Here are the historical quarterly amounts that have already been donated (money transferred):
As of 01/29/2026 there are $553,830 in pending donations. Pending means the affiliate commission has been earned but has not been paid to us by the store yet. As soon as the commissions are paid to us, we send it to the appropriate charity within 30 days.
How the Donations Get to the Nonprofits (Donation distribution process):
Get Change is our third party partner for delivering funds to charities. They operate a donor advised fund called the Our Change Foundation (OCF), to which Give Freely makes all of the donations. Get Change notifies charities that they need to sign up (for free) on getchange.io in order to receive payments, which they will then promptly receive from OCF on a regular basis (typically monthly). If you are a nonprofit organization looking to view donations, you can do so at https://api.getchange.io/sign_up?nonprofit.
What Info do we Collect about You, and What do we do with it? (Your Personal Information):
In short: we don't sell your data, we don't track your browsing, and we only share your name/email with a charity if you explicitly give us permission.
The details: We offer several extensions of our own, such as Give Freely and JokeTab, as well as partner with a number of existing extensions. If you are using our own Give Freely extension, when you first install, you create an account which includes some personal information (name, email) as well as your preferred charity. We share that information with your selected charity only if you opt-in to doing so when you select the charity. Otherwise, we never share this information with any third party.
If you are using our JokeTab extension, or one of our partner extensions, then we only collect the minimum information necessary to confirm a qualifying purchase occurred and to credit your donation to the correct nonprofit, and a small amount of general analytics covering usage information (e.g. once-per-day indications that the extension is active, periodic refreshes of the list of partner stores, and warning/error logging functionality) that enables us to improve the quality of the extension. IP addresses are temporarily stored for security and functionality, and are not permanently retained, nor, per above, ever shared with anyone other than with partners providing general analytics services like Google Analytics, event logging, or IP lookups to determine country location. Partner companies that may see your IP address are contractually prohibited from using that IP address for any purpose other than supporting Give Freely. In plain language, we don't monitor your browsing behavior, we don't collect any personally identifiable information about you (other than when you explicitly register for Give Freely), and in all cases, we never share this information for marketing purposes without your explicit consent (i.e. when you give us permission to share your name/email with your selected charity).
Respecting Common Sense Affiliate Rules (Affiliate policy):
Give Freely suspends or corrects any donation attribution mechanism that is found to be in violation of merchant terms of services or fair attribution. This ensures that Give Freely only receives commissions for purchases where attribution is legitimately earned, and that no party is misled regarding the source of a transaction.
For context, certain browser extensions like Honey have previously been identified as improperly claiming affiliate credit where they did not contribute to the transaction. Give Freely, on the other hand, does not do this ("stands down"), and therefore is automatically disabled for all known affiliate marketplaces when another affiliate code has already been set. Anytime anyone reports to us that we unknowingly take credit where we don’t deserve it, we fix the issue immediately.
Our Donation Functionality is Always Optional
Our mission is to raise money for worthy causes. Through the Give Freely extension and partner extensions we are proud to be able to offer donation opportunities to many users. We recognize that not everyone wants to see these prompts. For that reason, any user can easily suppress the donation opportunity for either a short period of time (a day or week) or permanently, simply by selecting the button in the donation popup. We believe users should always remain in control, and the product is designed so that participation is optional and adjustable at any time.
Founder’s Commitment (Overall Mission):
Give Freely was created by Steve Kaufer, co-founder and former CEO of Tripadvisor. After stepping away from Tripadvisor, Steve chose to personally fund this company as a way to generate meaningful support for charities. The company is not designed to generate profit for its founder; its purpose is to maximize charitable donations. Give Freely does not take a cut from affiliate commissions; operating costs are paid separately by the company. Steve's goal is to be able to generate 10 times more in charitable contributions what it costs him to run the company (i.e. if it costs him $5M/year to run the company, he wants the company to be collecting and donating $50M in affiliate fees to worthwhile nonprofits.)
Give Freely is incorporated in Delaware as a Public Benefit Limited Liability Corporation (LLC).
If you have questions, concerns, or feedback, please email us directly at transparency@givefreely.com. We try to respond to all inquiries within 3 business days.