Indiegogo Review

Pros

• Crowdfunding for both tech and creative projects
• Can choose all-or-nothing funding or keep-it-all funding
• Can run a Patreon-style ongoing crowdfunding campaign after your initial campaign succeeds
• Good customer support
• Does not prescreen campaigns as Kickstarter does

Cons

• Limited communication between campaigners and backers
• Backers don’t always get promised rewards
• Less site traffic than Kickstarter

Indiegogo Overview

Indiegogo is a crowdfunding platform for creative, tech, and community projects. Often mentioned alongside Kickstarter, Indiegogo distinguishes itself from its larger competitor with the flexibility it allows campaigners in terms of how they raise money and how they run their campaigns.

In our Indiegogo review, we’re going to answer the following questions: How does Indiegogo work? Is Indiegogo legit? Is Indiegogo safe? Read on for our full Indiegogo review.

Services Offered By Indiegogo

Indiegogo is a crowdfunding platform where users can raise funds from individual backers for business and community projects. When launching a fundraising campaign, you can choose from the following categories:

• Tech & Innovation
  • Audio
  • Camera Gear
  • Education
  • Energy & Green Tech
  • Fashion & Wearables
  • Food & Beverages
  • Health & Fitness
  • Home
  • Phones & Accessories
  • Productivity
  • Transportation
  • Travel & Outdoors
• Creative Works
  • Art
  • Comics
  • Dance & Theater
  • Film
  • Music
  • Photography
  • Podcasts, Blogs & Vlogs
  • Tabletop Games
  • Video Games
  • Web Series & TV Shows
  • Writing & Publishing
• Community Projects
  • Culture
  • Environment
  • Human Rights
  • Local Businesses
  • Wellness

Additionally, Indiegogo offers InDemand, a service you can enroll in after completing your initial rewards crowdfunding campaign, whether your campaign was on Indiegogo or another website. With InDemand, you continue raising money for an indefinite period — and without fixed fundraising goals. If your initial campaign was an Indiegogo campaign, your original fundraising page is left up and used as a validating factor for your project.

Indiegogo Project Qualifications

To launch an Indiegogo campaign, you have to be 18+ or between the ages of 13 and 17 with an 18+ guardian responsible for following the terms of use. Beyond that, you can’t raise money for a project that is illegal, harmful to others, or a scam. You also can’t offer prohibited perks, such as alcohol/drug paraphernalia, weapons, or any form of financial investment.

Here are the kind of crowdfunding campaigns Indiegogo supports:

• For-profit campaigns
• Campaigns benefitting nonprofit organizations or nonprofit beneficiaries
• Campaigns for products
• Anything within “Community Projects” that is not a personal cause
• Educational campaigns in the Tech and Innovation category

If you’re looking to raise money for a personal cause, such as a medical emergency or a memorial, you should look into GoFundMe or another cause-oriented crowdfunder instead.

Indiegogo Terms & Fees

These are the terms and fees for Indiegogo’s crowdfunding campaigns:

Indiegogo uses Stripe as its credit card processor. Apple Pay and Google Pay are also accepted.

When you launch an Indiegogo campaign, you can choose between a flexible campaign and a fixed campaign. With a flexible campaign, you can keep whatever you raise from backers, even if you don’t reach your funding goal. By contrast, if you’ve launched a fixed crowdfunding campaign, you must reach your funding goal to collect what you’ve raised. If your fixed campaign doesn’t meet its fundraising goals, all contributions are refunded (and therefore, no fees are taken).

With Indiegogo, you have the option of offering perks to your contributors, but you’re not required to do so. Indiegogo recommends that you do offer perks, though, noting that campaigns offering perks raise 143% more money than those that don’t. You can offer up to 20 levels of perks to your contributors based on the amount they contribute to your campaign.

This flexibility stands in contrast to Kickstarter, which requires campaigners to run “fixed” funding campaigns and requires that perks be offered.

Keep in mind that while your Indiegogo campaign can run for up to 60 days, Indiegogo advises that a funding period of 30-40 days is optimal for success, according to the company’s data. Additionally, while the limit is 60 days, Indiegogo states that “we may choose to offer an extension in our sole discretion.”

Some additional notes regarding fees:

• InDemand campaigns that succeed successful Indiegogo campaigns are charged a platform fee of 5%, but if your initial campaign started on another platform, your InDemand platform fee will be 8%.
• Indiegogo states that the InDemand fee for funds “driven by Indiegogo’s platform channels” is 15%.

Application Process

Indiegogo places a greater emphasis on flexibility than other platforms — such as Kickstarter — do. When you fill out the application and apply to start your campaign, approval is automatic — you won’t have to wait to be approved. In fact, there are cases of crowdfunding projects that were suspended from Kickstarter and subsequently moved over to Indiegogo, where their campaign was allowed to run to completion.

Sales & Advertising Transparency

Crowdfunding platforms typically aren’t heavy on deception sales-y gimmicks, and Indiegogo is no exception. Everything is spelled out quite thoroughly, and there are no nasty surprises for project creators. For backers, it’s a different story, but that’s part of having a flexible crowdfunding platform.

Customer Service & Technical Support

Indiegogo’s customer service is well-regarded by crowdfunding standards. There’s an extensive help section, and if your question isn’t answered in the information given, there’s a contact form you can use to get in touch with Indiegogo. Sadly, there is no phone support or live chat. Nonetheless, judging by the opinion landscape, Indiegogo’s responsiveness to user concerns seems to be above average for the industry.

Indiegogo Reviews, Complaints, & Testimonials

Negative Reviews & Complaints

Indiegogo is, by design, a loosely regulated crowdfunding arena intended to give the widest possible range of creative and charitable causes the ability to attract funding from a community of backers. However, this entails a great deal of caveat emptor for backers.

Indiegogo currently earns a mediocre 2.5 out of 5 average user rating on Trustpilot, and a vast majority of the complaints come from miffed backers. People find themselves backing lots of projects that never come to fruition, do not distribute the promised perks, or distribute defective or deficient perks. Users also fault the limited communication Indiegogo facilitates between campaigners and backers.

If you’re backing a project on Indiegogo, you have to go into it with a certain mindset. You’re not necessarily making a purchase or an investment but rather contributing to a project or cause you’d like to help succeed, with no guarantee that you’ll see anything in return. A more controlled crowdfunding platform might provide better value to the backer, but it could also cut against Indiegogo’s ethos of providing a platform to the broadest range of campaigners.

Positive Reviews & Testimonials

Professional reviewers are mostly positive about Indiegogo, praising the ease with which one can set up a crowdfunding campaign and the wide variety of projects and causes that qualify for funding. The fact that you can set up a campaign as either fixed (all-or-nothing) or flexible (keep-whatever-you-raise) also comes in for plaudits.

Users have found plenty to applaud about Indiegogo as well, citing good customer service, a solid interface, and the option to use flexible funding. Others noted that they were able to use Indiegogo after Kickstarter rejected their projects.

Final Verdict

Indiegogo doesn’t have the following that Kickstarter has, which can be an issue when it comes to attracting backers. However, the platform makes a strong play for being the crowdfunder for the rest of us.

Certain kinds of expertly conceived projects may be better off going with another crowdfunding platform, but for projects and causes that might have a hard time qualifying for funding on Kickstarter, Indiegogo is a solid choice. It provides the opportunity to solicit funding from the widest possible range of folks from all over the globe. Given that the raison d’etre of crowdfunding sites is supposed to be democratizing the ability to funnel money to people and causes shut out of traditional funding means, it’s hard not to admire Indiegogo.

Backers may be taking a risk by sinking their hard-earned cash into an Indiegogo campaign, but risks are inherent in Indiegogo’s open-armed approach. Despite its flaws, from the perspective of those seeking to raise money for a business/creative project, Indiegogo stays true to the original spirit of crowdfunding.

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