How GiveKit gets enterprise-grade competitive intel on a startup budget

If KeepTabz were to disappear tomorrow, I don't think it would just be us that would miss it. Everybody in the startup community should be sad. - Zac Brown, CEO @ GiveKit

GiveKit, the all-in-one fundraising toolkit for modern nonprofits, was buried in spreadsheets trying to keep up with a crowded nonprofit-tech market — until co-founder and CEO Zac Brown swapped manual tracking for affordable competitive intelligence from KeepTabz. The result: hours saved every day, surprise insights that reshaped product strategy, and the kind of market awareness that used to be reserved for companies with enterprise budgets.

About GiveKit

GiveKit (formerly NonprofitsHQ) is the complete fundraising toolkit for modern nonprofits. Based in San Antonio, the company gives nonprofit organizations a single platform to manage donors, staff, volunteers, fundraising, ticketing, and events — replacing the patchwork of spreadsheets and point tools most nonprofits stitch together today. The mission is to modernize how nonprofits run: get them out of fragile spreadsheets and into something more compliant, efficient, and trackable. GiveKit serves charities, religious organizations, educational institutions, associations, and community-service groups across the U.S.

The challenge

For all the workflow modernization GiveKit was selling to its customers, the team had a problem of its own. When it came to tracking competitors, they couldn't get out of spreadsheets. The nonprofit-tech category is crowded and getting more crowded by the week — established players doing $24–$50M in annual recurring revenue at one end, and a steady stream of new AI-built SaaS products entering the market at the other.

We found ourselves buried deep in spreadsheets while trying to track all of our different competitors. Even when we got information that was important to us, it was just buried in this massive dump of data that really wasn't helpful.

Zac estimates the team was burning a couple of hours a day cleaning spreadsheets, deciding what mattered, and only then starting the actual work of deciding what to do about it. With AI making it cheaper than ever to launch new SaaS products, the trickle of competitive moves had become a firehose. Manual tracking couldn't keep pace.

Why GiveKit chose KeepTabz

Zac wasn't shopping for enterprise software. Like most startup founders, he'd looked at the legacy competitive intelligence platforms and concluded they were priced for Fortune 500 budgets, not for an early-stage company. He wanted the same enterprise-grade market awareness without the enterprise-grade invoice.

KeepTabz delivered exactly that. The pitch — “competitor intelligence that doesn't suck,” in Zac's words — landed because it matched his reality: easy onboarding, an interface his team could actually use, and a price point that didn't require him to empty the checking account.

You can find probably comparable solutions to KeepTabz. You can spend a stupid amount of money for a somewhat comparable product, or for just $100 a month, you have access to that kind of enterprise-level competitor intelligence.

What sealed it was the AI-powered scoring on every update. Every change KeepTabz surfaces — ads, SEO shifts, news, website changes, social posts — comes with a competitive impact ranking. Instead of staring at a dump of data, Zac sees a triaged dashboard that points him at what matters first.

How GiveKit uses KeepTabz today

Today, KeepTabz is GiveKit's competitive command center. Zac opens the dashboard and immediately scans the top-ranked updates in each category — ads, SEO movement, news, and website changes — without wading through everything else. The competitive impact score is the feature he leans on hardest. “That little, easy, simple functionality adds so much immediate value to us,” he said.

Website change tracking, in particular, exposed a category Zac didn't even know to watch: changes to competitor Terms of Service. “We didn't know that we should be tracking those,” he said. “Even if you'd told me to, how the hell do I track that? I'm not going to log in and look at every document across all our competitors.” KeepTabz summarizes what changed and what it likely signals — quietly closing a gap GiveKit didn't know it had.

The results

• A couple of hours a day saved on manual competitor research, freed up for marketing and product work.
• Directly shaped a major product decision — the design of GiveKit's new free tier — based on competitive intel surfaced through KeepTabz.
• Surfaced signals GiveKit didn't know to track, including competitor Terms-of-Service changes.
• Enterprise-grade competitive awareness for roughly $100/month instead of the five- and six-figure enterprise tools.

The free-tier story is the headline. GiveKit was preparing to launch a new tier targeting a specific set of customer bandwidth needs — a move that would reshape the existing free offering. While planning, Zac noticed in KeepTabz that a competitor had attempted something nearly identical and was actively sunsetting it. He pulled the thread, studied how that competitor had executed and positioned the program, understood why it had failed for them, and used that intelligence to shape GiveKit's version instead. A single competitive signal, surfaced automatically, changed the product roadmap.

KeepTabz brings enterprise-level competitor intelligence to startups, in a very high-quality, affordable way.

What's next

With KeepTabz as a permanent fixture in the workflow, Zac and the GiveKit team are scaling competitive coverage as they expand into adjacent nonprofit segments — charities, religious organizations, schools, clubs, and community-service groups — each with its own competitive set. They also plan to feed competitive intel into how sales conversations are briefed and how the roadmap gets prioritized, so every product decision happens with the market in view, not in spite of it.

See how KeepTabz can turn competitor noise into product strategy for your team. Start your free trial or book a demo.