What's New: A $5 cap on bank gift fees, clearer Pledge payments, and a Member change history

Hey Fans! This one is mostly about money: what you pay us, what your Members see before they press Give, and keeping card-testing bots out of your checkout. Plus a better record of who changed what on a Member.

The platform fee on a bank gift now stops at $5

Stripe caps its own ACH fee at $5, but our platform fee on bank payments didn't have a cap. That meant a $2,000 bank gift paid a $20 platform fee, which wasn't fair. Now MemberDrive's fee on any single bank (ACH) gift tops out at $5. Card fees work the same as before, and Bitcoin is still 0%.

The "cover the fees" estimate your Members see and the fee calculator on our pricing page both use the same capped rule, so the numbers match what actually gets charged. One caveat: a few older Stripe subscriptions still pay the plain percentage, because Stripe can't cap a percent. New memberships don't use that setup anymore.

Pledge payments show the fees up front

When a Member made a payment toward a Pledge, the summary said one amount and the button said another, because covering fees was turned on by default and the summary didn't show it. Now the Pledge payment form shows the payment, a "Cover the fees" row they can turn off, the total due today, and the Pledge balance left after the payment. The suggested amount no longer adds fees on top of fees, either.

Every change to a Member's details is on their timeline

When a Member's name, address, phone, or email changes, the Member's timeline now records it, with the old and new value and who made the change: a Manager, the Member, MemberDrive support, or a Checkout. Linking and unlinking duplicate Members shows up on the timeline too. No more guessing when an address changed or why.

Card-testing bots get stopped at checkout

Fraudsters like to use donation forms to test stolen cards with lots of tiny charges. Checkout now runs a quiet human check before saving anything or trying a card, limits repeated declines, and can pause small card amounts for anonymous visitors if an Organization suddenly sees a flood of them. We built it so a room full of real Members giving on the same event wifi doesn't get blocked, and signed-in Members aren't affected by the pauses.

Under the hood

Over the last couple of weeks we also hardened checkout against malformed requests, fixed rare cases where a Stripe payment or subscription could fail to import when two updates arrived at once, applied a security update to our search library, and locked down our build pipeline.

Why it matters

Fees should be fair and visible, and your donor records should tell the truth about what happened. As always, if something feels off, reply and tell me.