What a donation panel actually costs
A flat platform fee versus a percentage-based processor and your own maintenance hours
"Free" donation panels and percentage-based payment processors both hide their real cost. This is the math to actually run before picking one, using Forgeport's own pricing as the flat-fee example since it's the one number here that isn't an estimate.
Percentage fees scale with your success, forever
A processor that takes a cut of every donation — whether it's a flat percentage or a per-transaction fee — costs more exactly when your server is doing well. A flat monthly fee doesn't. Forgeport is €19.99/month (Starter, one server) or €29.99/month (Pro, up to three), and takes 0% of what players pay, because payments route through your own connected Stripe account and you are the merchant of record.
Compare a flat €19.99/month against a percentage-based cost at a few donation volumes:
| Monthly donations | €19.99 flat, as % | 5% processor cut | 10% processor cut |
|---|---|---|---|
| €100 | 20.0% | €5 | €10 |
| €300 | 6.7% | €15 | €30 |
| €800 | 2.5% | €40 | €80 |
| €2,000 | 1.0% | €100 | €200 |
Below roughly €150–200/month in donations, a flat fee is genuinely the more expensive option — say so to yourself honestly before switching, especially for a small or early-season server. Above that, every percentage point a processor takes is a number that only grows.
The hours nobody puts on the invoice
A self-hosted PHP panel or a webshop script is free to download and never free to run. The real cost shows up as:
- Keeping it working through a Stripe/PayPal API change.
- Porting it when you change chronicle, pack, or hosting.
- The support tickets from "I paid and got nothing" — which, on most home-rolled panels, means an SQL write into a live server that silently didn't take effect. See why a donation panel breaks when the player is online and, for L2Off specifically, delivering items without touching the game tables — both describe failure modes that read as "the panel is broken" to a player but are really a missing idempotency or delivery-queue layer.
- A GM manually mailing items because the automated path doesn't cover skills, or doesn't work while the player is logged in.
None of that shows up as a monthly bill, which is exactly why it's easy to undercount.
The honest comparison
Add up, for your own server: your processor's percentage at your actual donation volume, plus a rough hourly cost for the panel-maintenance and manual-delivery time you're already spending, and compare it to a flat €19.99–29.99/month with 0% taken and delivery that doesn't need a GM online. For a small or brand-new server the flat fee can lose that comparison — which is a reason to wait, not a reason to distrust the math.