No category on GoFundMe pulls in more money than medical bills. That holds true not only in the United States but across all 20 countries where the company operates — nationalized healthcare systems included.
Tim Cadogan, GoFundMe’s CEO, volunteered that detail when I put the obvious question to him: isn’t the company’s biggest revenue driver a symptom of a broken American system? His answer muddies the premise. It doesn’t make it go away.
Cadogan’s first day was March 2, 2020. Roughly a week later it became clear in the US that the pandemic would carry major implications, though elsewhere the picture had already sharpened. Italy, an important market for the company, was the first European country hit hard. GoFundMe had gone remote before Cadogan’s opening week was out.
The figure that captures how far it spread
When Cadogan took the job, GoFundMe’s unaided brand awareness sat in the mid-30s. Today it is around 70 percent, with aided awareness in the low 90s. More than a third of American adults have used the platform, he said.
I suggested to him that 2020 was the year GoFundMe turned into a load-bearing piece of American culture, much as Zoom briefly became load-bearing for American business. The phrase was new to him, and he seemed to like it.
The Zoom parallel doesn’t hold for long, though. Zoom is enterprise software that leaked into consumer life. GoFundMe sits on top of questions about how communities should take care of each other, and whether asking is shameful.
The pandemic scenario nobody had planned for
Medical campaigns were anticipated. Restaurant campaigns were not.
With hundreds of thousands of small businesses shut down, loyal customers began launching campaigns for the wait staff and kitchen staff at their neighborhood spots. Tens of thousands of them. Operationally, that broke something.
Withdrawing money requires a know-your-customer verification. A business goes through a KYB process instead, and that one demands paperwork. With nobody at their place of business, the paperwork didn’t exist. Cadogan said GoFundMe and its third-party payment processors had to work out how to clear the backlog.
How the money actually moves
This is the piece most people get wrong. GoFundMe takes no platform cut on consumer fundraisers. The only mandatory fees are transaction processing: 2.9 percent plus 30 cents per transaction in the US, identical to the rate you’d hit buying gas with a credit card.
Beyond that, donors are asked for a voluntary tip. Last year, 15 to 20 million people gave nothing, Cadogan said. Those who do pay typically part with a few dollars.
Personal fundraisers draw an average donation of between $80 and $100, Cadogan said, having checked the number that morning. It varies by category and country. Over on the GoFundMe Pro side, which sells fundraising software to nonprofits including World Central Kitchen, the Salvation Army, the Mayo Clinic and the Cleveland Clinic, recurring monthly donations land closer to $25 to $30.
Eighty million people donated last year. Across the past 10 to 15 years the platform has generated over $40 billion of help, with 850 employees.
Why voluntary tipping doesn’t fall apart
Optional payment sounds like a terrible business model. Cadogan credits the law of large numbers for saving it: any one person’s behavior is wildly variable, but spread across tens of millions of donations it settles into a steady average.
I asked whether GoFundMe has whales the way Apple has Candy Crush whales — a handful of people producing an outsized share of fees. Cadogan said no, and said it twice. Donations cluster in the center of the bell curve, and larger donors tip a smaller percentage.
The tipping interface was once a stepper that took a couple of clicks to change. Cadogan pushed for the slider that’s there now, adjustable in under two seconds without a click and surfaced in the main flow, at checkout and on the receipt. That runs opposite to the enshittification direction, and he knows the pull exists.
The AI coach is running more volume than anticipated
Testing the Smart Fundraising Coach, I nearly kicked off a fundraiser by accident. Tell it you’re opening a puppy shelter and it writes the campaign.
The component-level tools arrived first. After noticing that people were abandoning at the title step, GoFundMe began suggesting three titles. More than 90 million uses of those components later, the company launched the full chat-based coach earlier this year.
GoFundMe expected the coach to help raise roughly $125 million more this year. It’s on track to double that, to a quarter of a billion, Cadogan said. Two-thirds of users report feeling less stressed, more confident and less alone.
Cadogan recounted watching a woman whose close friend’s son had died try to write a campaign. Coherent sentences were beyond her. The coach pulled the substance out of what she was saying.
Where I pushed and he mostly held firm
A University of Washington study covering over half a million medical expense campaigns found that 30 percent raised $0. The heavier a state’s medical debt load, the less its campaigns raise. That isn’t redistribution working. That’s redistribution failing in exactly the places it’s needed most.
Separately, economists found that ACA Medicaid expansion produces a significant reduction in health-related GoFundMe campaigns. Expand coverage, and campaigns in that state drop.
So I asked the blunt version: do you lobby against it? Cadogan’s answer was immediate. “No, we definitely don’t lobby against that.” I’ve had CEOs on this show lobby against things that would harm their business, which is why the question was worth asking.
His case is that the emotional layer outlasts any policy fix. “When we help each other, we do not do it in expectation of return. It’s not a product or a service. You’re not buying anything. You are helping because you care and, in many cases, because you love someone else,” Cadogan said. On institutional support: “The NHS can do a lot. Medicare in Australia can do a lot, but it’s not coming with love, right?”
Both things can be true. The redistribution is still unequal, and the platform still profits from the gap.
What GoFundMe won’t raise money for
The terms of service ban fundraising for the legal defense of violent and financial crimes. Murder, fraud, a list of nasty things. Cadogan called it a values decision that reflects nothing about anyone’s guilt or innocence.
The frozen Gaza fundraisers, an ongoing controversy since 2023, are a different matter, Cadogan said — not a values call at all. GoFundMe has enabled over half a billion dollars of support into the Israel-Gaza conflict, he said, and some campaigns didn’t meet criteria under national and international regulations enforced alongside its processors.
Those processors are Adyen, Stripe and PayPal Giving Fund. Money from personal fundraisers never passes through GoFundMe’s hands, which Cadogan frames as a checks-and-balances feature rather than a limitation.
The nonprofit pages misstep
GoFundMe built pages for nonprofits that hadn’t signed up. State attorneys general accused it of plagiarizing charity pages. The company apologized, took the pages down, and is facing a class action lawsuit.
Cadogan’s read: “classic tech company thing, we moved a little bit too quickly.” With over 100 million monthly visitors, the aggregator logic was obvious. The consent step wasn’t.
I asked why AI slop hasn’t flooded a platform sitting on that much demand for actual money, not clicks. Cadogan thinks the format resists it. Over 80 percent of donors are first-degree connections, so a fundraiser that doesn’t resonate with your own network never gets the initial momentum it needs, leaving a synthetic campaign nothing to bootstrap from. He said the company is on guard and hasn’t seen crazy spikes in fundraiser starts.
That’s a real structural defense. It also rests on emotional authenticity being unforgeable, and I’d take the other side of that bet. When I raised it, Cadogan didn’t dig in: “The more powerful the technology, the more significant and unknown the implications. So I’m sure some of those guys are right.”
For an honest test of whether GoFundMe is a platform or a safety net, look at Altadena. Cadogan’s own town burned in January of last year. Six thousand homes gone, roughly two-thirds of the population displaced. Over 10,000 families used GoFundMe. It wasn’t enough to replace a house, he said. It covered first month’s rent somewhere else.