You typed £10 into the box. The screen now says £12.00.
Somewhere between those two numbers a decision was made on your behalf, and if you're like most people you'll pay the £12.00 without working out exactly what the extra £2.00 was for. It's a small amount, you're in a hurry, and interrogating a leaving collection feels like bad manners.
That £2.00 is not a made-up figure. It's the amount one of the larger UK collection pot platforms pre-selects on a £10 contribution, which we sat down and measured this week. The card processing on £10 costs about 39p.
This guide is the working-out. Three things can sit between the money you intend to give and the money the recipient gets, and only one of them is a real cost. Here's how to tell which is which on any collection pot, in about twenty seconds.
The three places money goes
Every online collection pot has up to three charges attached to it. Most platforms have one or two. A few have all three.
The card processing fee. A genuine, unavoidable cost. Someone has to move the money.
The tip, top-up, or "support" amount. Sometimes this is the processing fee wearing a different hat. Sometimes it's revenue on top of a processing fee you're already paying. These two things look identical on screen and are completely different in substance.
The exit charges. What it costs to get the money out at the other end. Almost nobody checks these before contributing, and they're where the largest single deductions in this category live.
Take them in order.
1. The processing fee is fine
Let's dispose of this one quickly, because it's the part people get angriest about and it's the part that's legitimate.
Moving money costs money. Card networks charge. Fraud checks cost. Chargebacks cost. Safeguarding contributors' funds in a ringfenced account with a regulated institution costs. The going rate across UK group gifting is 1.9% + 20p per contribution, and essentially every platform in the category charges roughly that — including us.
On a £12.50 contribution that's about 44p. It is not a scandal. Any platform claiming to be entirely free is either recovering that cost somewhere you haven't looked yet, or it's recovering it from the tip.
The only real question about the processing fee is who absorbs it:
The contributor covers it — you give £12.50, you're charged £12.94, the full £12.50 lands in the pot.
The pot absorbs it — you're charged £12.50, and about £12.06 lands in the pot.
Neither is dishonest. What matters is that you're told which one is happening before you pay. On Hey Friday the organiser picks when they set the collection up, and the contribution screen shows you the resulting number before you commit to it.
2. The tip is where it gets interesting
Here's the distinction that this entire post exists to make, because once you can see it you can't unsee it.
A tip that covers the processing fee is the processing fee, renamed. The platform doesn't deduct anything from the pot; instead it invites you to add roughly the cost of processing on top, so the recipient gets the round number. That's a presentational choice, not a hidden charge. It's arguably the more honest layout of the two, because the cost is itemised in front of you rather than quietly netted off the total.
A tip charged on top of a processing fee you're already paying is something else entirely. The fee is deducted from the pot and you're asked to add 10–15% for the platform. That second amount isn't covering a cost. It's margin, collected from the person least placed to say no.
The two are told apart by a single question: is the platform also deducting a separate processing fee from the pot? If yes, the tip is on top of it. If no, the tip is the fee.
The tell is usually in the wording. "Your tip covers the payment processing fee so every penny reaches the gift" describes the first model. "Chip in a little extra to support us" alongside a fee that's already coming out of the pot describes the second.
Watch for a sentence doing both jobs at once, though — because the most common wording in this category is technically the first model while behaving like the second. "Your tip first covers the processing fee" is true, and it stops being the whole truth the moment the pre-selected tip is several times larger than the fee it's covering.
What the defaults actually are
We ran contributions of different sizes through one of the larger UK collection pot checkouts and wrote down the pre-selected top-up at each. The processing fee it discloses is 1.9% + 20p — the same as ours.
You contribute | Pre-selected top-up | That's | Actual processing cost | Default is |
|---|---|---|---|---|
£2 | £0.44 | 22% | £0.24 | 1.8× the fee |
£5 | £1.00 | 20% | £0.30 | 3.4× the fee |
£10 | £2.00 | 20% | £0.39 | 5.1× the fee |
£20 | £3.60 | 18% | £0.58 | 6.2× the fee |
£50 | £6.00 | 12% | £1.15 | 5.2× the fee |
£100 | £12.00 | 12% | £2.10 | 5.7× the fee |
The pattern holds across the range: the default sits at roughly five to six times what processing actually costs. The tip does cover the fee. It also covers a good deal more than the fee, and the screen doesn't break that out.
The dropdown reinforces it. On a £10 contribution the options are £2.16, £2.00, £1.80, £1.00 and "Other" — the highest option sits above the default, so the pre-selection reads as moderate. There is no £0 in the list at any contribution size. The cheapest one-click choice is still around 2.6× the processing cost.
Getting to zero takes five steps
Opting out entirely is possible. Here's the full path:
Open the dropdown.
Choose "Other" — the only route to nothing.
Find the field pre-filled with the default you were trying to avoid, rather than blank.
Clear it and type 0.
Watch the field turn red: "Amount must be between £0 and £1000" — an error state on a number the same message confirms is allowed.
Then a note appears, naming the person you're buying a present for: "just checking! [Recipient] will receive £97.90, adding a little extra above ensures they'll receive your full contribution."
That is confirmshaming, and it's the single most recognisable dark pattern in consumer software. It's the unsubscribe flow that asks whether you're sure you want to miss out, transplanted into a moment where the person on the other end of the guilt is a named colleague.
Neither tip model justifies any of that. A default is the strongest nudge in interface design, and using it to collect money the user hasn't decided to give is exactly the practice regulators in several markets are circling. We've written about why we think that pattern has to go.
The worked example
Fifteen colleagues chip in £10 each for a leaving present. £150 in the pot.
The actual cost of processing that: 39p per contribution, so £5.85 across the whole collection. That's the real number. That's what it costs to take £150 off fifteen cards and hold it safely.
With every contributor accepting the pre-selected £2.00 top-up: £30 across the collection. The processing still cost £5.85. The other £24.15 is margin — collected in fifteen separate small decisions, each made in about four seconds by someone who didn't want to look tight in front of their team.
Nobody in that office is aware it happened. The leaver gets their £150 and is delighted. Fifteen people paid an average of £1.61 each that they never chose to pay, and not one of them will ever check.
3. The exit charges nobody checks
This is the part of the category that gets the least scrutiny, because by the time it applies, the contributors have all moved on and only one person — the recipient — is exposed to it.
Conversion fees. If a pot can only be redeemed against a fixed list of retailer gift cards, taking it as cash instead is often a chargeable upgrade. It's a real charge on money that was already yours.
Dormancy or storage fees. Some platforms start charging a monthly fee once a closed pot has gone unspent for a period. The logic is that holding funds has a cost. The effect is that a gift someone hasn't got round to spending gets smaller.
Withdrawal fees. Less common now, but check.
None of these are visible at the moment you contribute, which is exactly why they're worth two minutes on the pricing page before your team commits to a platform.
Five questions before you chip in
If you want to audit any collection pot quickly, these are the five that surface everything:
Is a processing fee being deducted from the pot, a tip being requested, or both? Both is the answer that should slow you down.
Is any optional amount pre-selected? If you have to actively reduce it, it isn't optional in any meaningful sense.
What does it cost the recipient to take the money as cash? Ask before, not after.
Is there a time limit before fees start? Look for "storage", "dormancy", or "inactivity".
Where is the money held while the pot is open? It should be safeguarded with an FCA-authorised Electronic Money Institution, or with the platform acting as agent of one. Segregated, not mingled with the company's own working capital.
Any platform that makes four of those five hard to answer from its pricing page has made a choice about how much you're meant to know.
What we do
Our fee is 1.9% + 20p per contribution — the same as the rest of the category, because that's what payment processing genuinely costs here. The organiser chooses whether contributors cover it or the pot absorbs it, and whichever they pick, the number is on screen before anyone pays.
There is no tip prompt. Not a pre-selected one, not a zero-default one, not a "support us" line at the bottom. The fee is the whole of what we take.
There's no charge to take the pot as money rather than vouchers, and no meter that starts running if the recipient doesn't spend it by a certain date. We'd rather earn less per collection than build a business on the four seconds of social pressure between someone typing an amount and pressing pay.
That's not charity. It's a bet that offices doing their fourth collection of the year would rather use the platform that didn't make them feel slightly worse the first three times.
A fee you can predict before you pay is a price. A fee you discover afterwards is a surprise. The whole of this category's reputation rests on which of those it decides to be.
Chipping in rather than organising? Our guide to how much to put in a work collection pot has the ranges that are actually normal. Organising one? Start a collection — three minutes, one link, and a fee you can work out in advance.