Is CiviCRM free?
Yes! … and No.
Yes, it’s free
CiviCRM is open source software. That means that are no licensing costs. You can download it and use it as much as you like for no cost: no one-off costs, no annual costs, no usage costs, nothing.
But it requires investment
CiviCRM has the potential to transform the way your charity works but as with any significant project it requires investment of time, skill and resources to make the implementation successful.
Direct costs may include:
- Hosting You need somewhere to run Civi. That could be your own server or on a hosting service.
- Emails Depending on what mail you want to send you may need to pay for this.
- SMS If you want to send text messages, that will cost.
- Payment processors If you want to accept online payments, you will need to pay a payment processor.
Besides those you will need:
- Planning It takes time to think about what your organisation wants to achieve with Civi and how to get there.
- Preparation You will need gather your existing data and prepare it for importing to Civi.
- Configuration You will need to configure Civi according to your requirements.
- Customisation If Civi does not do everything you need out of the box then you may want to consider customising it.
- Integration You may want to integrate Civi with other systems.
- Training Civi aims to be easy to use, but training helps people get the best out of it.
- Workflows You need to review your existing workflows and decide how to re-implement them with Civi.
- Maintenance Some ongoing maintenance is necessary to keep software updated.
- Enhancements Once your basic installation is functioning well you may want to explore additional Civi features.
That may seem daunting but we’re to help you! Squiffle Consulting will lead you through all the stages of the process to create a system that is right for you. Contact us now to start transforming your charity.
We will create a plan with you based on your priorities. For example, data needs to be correctly formatted for importing into Civi. Quite often that data needs to be reformatted which can be a time-consuming task. If your priority is cost, you may prefer to do that yourself. Alternatively, if you are short of time we can do that work for you.
Once Civi is up and running as you want it, the ongoing running costs are low and are mostly related to the direct costs listed above.