Kickstarter Review

Pros

• Most popular business/creative crowdfunding site
• Suited for large businesses
• Industry-standard fees
• Excellent media outreach

Cons

• Limited customer support
• Not all project proposals are accepted
• All or Nothing funding

What Is Kickstarter?

Kickstarter is the world’s best-known crowdfunding platform for tech projects and creative endeavors. With over 8 billion dollars raised, Kickstarter’s track record is unmatched in the field of business-focused crowdfunding.

Note that Kickstarter is not for personal causes — for that, you’ll need to use a platform like GoFundMe.

Another thing that distinguishes Kickstarter from most of its competitors: you must meet your fundraising goals within a set time period before you receive any funding. Furthermore, you must provide rewards (of your own creation) for your backers.

Keep reading our Kickstarter review for more details.

Services Offered By Kickstarter

Kickstarter provides a platform for users to raise funds from individual backers for creative projects. All Kickstarter projects must fall under one of the following broad categories:

• Arts
• Comics & Illustration
• Crafts
• Dance 
• Design
• Fashion
• Film
• Food
• Games
• Journalism
• Music 
• Photography
• Publishing
• Technology
• Theater

You can launch a Kickstarter campaign in the following countries:

• Australia
• Austria
• Belgium
• Canada
• Denmark
• France
• Germany
• Greece
• Hong Kong
• Ireland
• Italy
• Japan
• Luxembourg
• Mexico
• The Netherlands
• New Zealand
• Norway
• Poland
• Singapore
• Slovenia
• Spain
• Sweden
• Switzerland
• UK
• USA

Backers can support a Kickstarter project from almost anywhere in the world.

Kickstarter Project Qualifications

You must be 18 or older to launch a project on Kickstarter. Minors can participate in the creation of the project if they are supervised by the 18+ creator of the project.

Kickstarter has five rules for projects shared on the platform. All projects:

• Must create something that can be shared with others
• Must only have statistics that are honestly and clearly presented
• Can’t raise money for charity
• Can’t offer equity
• Can’t involve prohibited items

Prohibited items include items claiming to diagnose, cure, treat, or prevent illness; contests and raffles; energy food and drinks; offensive materials; genetically-modified organisms as rewards; alcohol as rewards; offering financial, phone, travel, and business marketing services; political fundraising; pornography; promotion of racism, bigotry, or discrimination; items that already exist or are repackaged; resale items; drugs, tobacco, and nicotine products; weapons, including accessories and replicas.

Campaigns are prescreened and will not go live until approved.

While not every project will be approved, Kickstarter is open to many types of creative projects around the world. For this reason, we’ve rated Kickstarter a perfect 5-star rating for project qualifications.

Kickstarter Terms & Fees

These are the terms and fees for Kickstarter’s US-based fundraising campaigns (international processing fees vary by local currency):

Note that while you can set a funding period of up to 60 days, Kickstarter recommends a funding period of 30 days or less, citing internal data that shows projects lasting 30 days or fewer have a greater shot at meeting their goals.

If your project’s funding period ends without the funding goal being met, you won’t collect any of the funds (or pay any fees), and all backers will be refunded.

Part of the terms of launching a Kickstarter project and accepting support from backers is that you provide physical (or digital) rewards for your backers upon completion of the project. The rewards you offer can depend on the level of support pledged.

Overall, Kickstarter’s terms and fees are pretty standard when compared to its competitors, earning it a score of 3.7/5 in this category.

Kickstarter’s Application Process

If you’re a permanent resident of any of the countries listed in the Services Offered section, you can apply to launch a Kickstarter project, provided the following qualifications are met:

• You are 18 or older
• You are creating a project in your own name or on behalf of a registered legal entity with which you are affiliated
• You have an address, bank account, and government-issued ID based in the country in which you’re creating a project
• If running your project as an individual, the linked bank account must belong to you
• You have a major credit or debit card

Starting a project is quite straightforward. You begin the process on the website, where you choose a category and verify your eligibility. You can then enter some basic information about your campaign, set your rewards and shipping costs, add a video along with a detailed project description to establish your story, add some profile information with links to your social accounts, and confirm your identity.

Once you’ve submitted your project for review, you’ll either pass the automated check and be able to launch your campaign immediately, or you’ll have to wait up to three days to launch if your project gets flagged for additional scrutiny.

After your campaign ends, funds are typically released after about 14 days — assuming that you met your fundraising goal.

Overall, Kickstarter’s process for applying and launching a campaign is fairly easy, although you may encounter delays getting your campaign approved and then again when it’s time to cash out. Overall, we rate Kickstarter 3.4/5 in this area.

Sales & Advertising Transparency

Every step of the crowdfunding process, from the initial application to completion, is detailed on Kickstarter’s website in a very straightforward manner. Nothing feels gimmicky or deceptive.

As Kickstarter only earns fees on completed fundraising campaigns, the company has little incentive to rope people into trying the platform who don’t already have a serious project in mind.

Kickstarter has social media profiles that it keeps updated frequently — something that you don’t see with every crowdfunder.

For doing so well in all of these areas, we gave Kickstarter a perfect rating for sales and advertising transparency.

Kickstarter Customer Service & Technical Support

Kickstarter may be the big dog of the crowdfunding industry, but its level of customer support doesn’t reflect that.

The only way to get in touch with Kickstarter is to submit a support ticket and wait to be contacted via email. This doesn’t give project creators (or backers, for that matter) access to the quick support they may need in the event of a mishap.

That said, there is a comprehensive knowledgebase available to cover the most common questions. Kickstarter also has a company blog and maintains profiles on Facebook, Instagram, X/Twitter, and YouTube.

There are some complaints about customer support, although most of these are from backers who feel as though they got scammed.

Overall, we aren’t very impressed with Kickstarter’s customer support, although it does have good self-service options. For these reasons, we give it a rating of 3.5/5.

User Reviews

Kickstarter is a pretty mixed bag when it comes to user reviews. It receives a rating of 3.8/5 (based on 20 reviews) on G2 and a rating of 1.2/5 (based on 960+ reviews) on Trustpilot. Kickstarter’s BBB page shows that it currently gets a rating of D- due to its failure to respond to complaints filed against the company. A total of 46 complaints have been closed against Kickstarter in the last 12 months.

While these ratings may seem a little shocking, we do want to note that many of the complaints and negative reviews come from backers who did not receive promised rewards or were unsatisfied with the outcome of a project. After a holistic look at the quality and quantity of reviews, we rated Kickstarter 2.8/5 stars in this area.

Negative Kickstarter Reviews & Complaints

Issues raised about Kickstarter by campaigners include:

• Uneven Playing Field: With the emergence of paid advertising, investor-based campaigns, and crowdfunding agencies on the site, big players can have an enormous advantage compared to smaller operations.
• Funding Delays: Some project owners were frustrated by how long it took for Kickstarter to release their funds after a successful campaign.
• Poor Customer Support: Both customers and backers were frustrated by the difficulty of getting in touch with Kickstarter customer service.

Positive Kickstarter Reviews & Testimonials

In a field such as crowdfunding, there is always going to be a significant element of risk. Most professional reviewers still give Kickstarter high marks, however, and the service remains extremely popular.

Benefits of using Kickstarter include:

• Good Approval Process: Kickstarter generally does a pretty good job of filtering out sketchier projects, reducing the risk to backers.
• Funds From Unsuccessful Projects Are Returned: Backers are only charged if the project is successfully funded.
• Media Outreach: Kickstarter’s media outreach is very effective, and the site gets a lot of unique visits. This increases the likelihood that your project will be seen.

Is Kickstarter Right For You?

Kickstarter sits atop the crowdfunding world and is an excellent place to launch your creative project, particularly if your project involves art, films, or games. Kickstarter is an avenue worth pursuing if you have a project you think may pique the interest of hobbyists and other creative types looking to involve themselves in the next big thing.

Kickstarter does fall flat in a few areas — specifically, customer support. Fortunately, there are plenty of self-help resources to help you understand the platform and what to expect throughout the funding process. Having to go through a prescreening process, all-or-nothing funding, and having to wait a few weeks to get your funds from a successful campaign are additional factors to keep in mind.

Overall, we rate Kickstarter a solid 4-out-of-5 rating. It’s a great platform for the right kind of project, but if you’re looking to run a different kind of crowdfunding campaign — perhaps one in which you can keep whatever you raise, regardless of your initial goal — check out our favorite Kickstarter alternatives.

Our Methodology

We spend hours researching and evaluating each crowdfunding platform that we review at Merchant Maverick, placing emphasis on key characteristics to generate our product ratings.

When rating crowdfunding platforms, we use a rubric that looks at terms and fees, project qualifications, application process, sales and advertising transparency, customer service, and user reviews. We weigh each section differently to calculate the total star rating.

• Terms & Fees: 25% of the total star rating
• Project Qualifications: 25% of the total star rating
• Application Process: 25% of the total star rating
• Sales & Advertising Transparency: 10% of the total star rating
• Customer Service: 10% of the total star rating
• User Reviews: 5% of the total star rating

Each section is further broken down into granular, weighted subsections, in which we look at specific attributes, such as campaign durations, supported project types, time to funding, application processing times, and platform fees. Learn more about how we rate crowdfunding platforms.

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