What a donation panel actually costs
A flat platform fee versus a percentage-based processor and your own maintenance hours
By Forgeport · Published 10 August 2026 · Updated 24 August 2026
Compare the processor fees, platform fee, and maintenance time before choosing a donation panel. The examples below use Forgeport's flat monthly price.
Percentage fees scale with revenue
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 can be the more expensive option for a small or early-season server. Above that, percentage-based fees continue to grow with revenue.
Maintenance time
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.
- Support tickets for missing deliveries, which on many self-hosted 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 failures caused by 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.
Compare the totals
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 new server, the flat fee may cost more until payment volume grows. What the flat fee buys is listed on the donation store page.
Why a donation panel breaks when the player is online
The idempotency problem every L2J donation panel eventually hits, and the grant flow that avoids it
Rewarding votes on the top-lists without getting gamed
Why "open the vote URL and claim" gets abused, and how real vote verification (API poll and signed callback) works