Why We Built Station Donations

There are over 23,000 volunteer and combination fire departments in the United States. They protect roughly 35% of the country's population. Most of them are broke.

These stations run on fundraisers — chicken BBQs, boot drives, pancake breakfasts. The money keeps the lights on, buys equipment, and pays for training. Without it, some of these departments would have to shut their doors.

The problem is that most of these stations have no web presence at all. The ones that do are stuck with complicated, expensive software that was never designed for a fire chief who just wants to sell BBQ dinners and collect donations. They don't have an IT department. They don't have a marketing budget. They have volunteers who run into burning buildings for free.

Station Donations is a simple tool that lets a fire chief build a professional fundraising website in about 5 minutes. No coding. No design skills. No monthly meetings with a web agency.

You pick a template, fill in the blanks — event name, date, ticket prices — and your page goes live. Donations and ticket sales go straight to your station's bank account through Stripe. You see every dollar on a dashboard. That's it.

We built the tool we wished existed when we started talking to volunteer chiefs about their biggest headaches. The answer was always the same: “We need money, and we need a way for people to give it to us online without it being a nightmare.”

We don't charge you a dime upfront. There's no setup fee, no monthly bill, and no credit card required to get started.

Instead, we take a small 4% platform fee on the donations and ticket sales that come through your site. Stripe also takes their standard processing fee on top of that — we don't control that part and we don't mark it up.

That 4% keeps our lights on, pays for the servers, and lets us keep building tools for you. If you don't raise money, we don't make money. We are in this together.

We will never hold your money. Every dollar goes straight from the donor to your station's bank account. We are not a middleman sitting on your funds — Stripe handles the transfer directly.

We will never sell your data. Your donor list is yours. Period.

We will keep building what you ask for. There's a feedback button inside the app. You tell us what you need, other stations vote on it, and we build it. This isn't software built in a boardroom. It's built by listening to the people who actually use it.