Money transfers for crafts creators

Handmade and crafts creators often draw a foreign audience. Someone in Berlin who loves your ceramics, a knitter in Toronto following your patterns, a woodworking fan in Warsaw, all of them can support you the moment they feel moved to. Donator accepts Georgian and foreign cards alike, Visa and Mastercard, with no extra friction and no separate account for the viewer to open.

Your viewer sends money in one tap, and you receive 97% of the amount at 3% commission. There is no minimum, so a small tip during a live glaze pour and a larger thank you after a finished piece both arrive the same clean way.

Because the card details sit on a simple, secure page, your audience never has to hand their information to a stranger. They see your name, they see the amount, they confirm. That clarity matters when the person paying is three time zones away.

Crafters live on thin margins. Clay, yarn, resin, tools, and shipping all cost money before a single sale, so every lari a supporter sends should stay with the maker. With Donator the platform takes no cut on transfers, which means a 50 GEL tip is 50 GEL in your account, not 42 after fees.

Compare that with the slow drip of percentages that other services quietly remove. Ten percent here, a fixed fee there, a currency spread on top, and by the end of the month a serious chunk of your support has evaporated. Zero percent is not a promotion that expires; it is how transfers work here.

For a maker running a small studio, that difference is the price of a new bag of clay every week, or the shipping on the next commission. Kept over a year, it is real income, not rounding.

Getting set up takes minutes. First, create your Donator page and add the Georgian bank card or account where you want your money to land, TBC or Bank of Georgia both work. Second, share your personal link in your stream description, on Instagram, or in a pinned comment during the broadcast.

When a viewer wants to support you, they open the link, type the amount, enter their card, and confirm. The transfer clears instantly and an alert can appear live on your stream. Third, your balance is paid out in GEL to the bank you connected, with no foreign wallet sitting in between.

There is nothing to convert by hand and no invoice to chase. You make things; the money side stays quiet and predictable in the background.

Picture a Saturday afternoon. You are wedging clay and throwing a set of mugs on the wheel while forty people watch. A regular from Tbilisi drops 20 GEL when the first mug takes shape. A Georgian living in Hamburg, who grew up with pots like these on the family table, sends 60 GEL and a note asking for one in blue.

Each transfer pops up on screen as it happens, so you can thank people by name without breaking your rhythm. By the end of the two hour session you have received support from a dozen viewers, in full, with nothing shaved off the top. The blue mug becomes next week's commission.

That is the whole loop: attention becomes gratitude, gratitude becomes a transfer, and the transfer becomes your next batch of materials.

A large part of a Georgian maker's warmest audience does not live in Georgia. They are in Germany, Greece, Italy, the United States, and beyond, and they miss the crafts and textures of home. For them, supporting a Georgian artisan is a small way to stay connected to it.

Donator makes that easy. A supporter abroad uses their local card in their local moment, and you receive clean GEL in Tbilisi or Kutaisi. No one has to think about SWIFT codes, cross border forms, or which wallet talks to which bank.

As Georgia's first platform of its kind, Donator is built for exactly this bridge between the maker at home and the diaspora that wants to give back, and it is expanding across the Caucasus.

Global tipping and creator tools exist, and some are polished. But they are built for other markets. Payouts often route through a foreign wallet, land in dollars or euros, and force you to convert to GEL yourself, losing money at each hop and waiting days for withdrawal.

Support for Georgian cards can be patchy, local tax reporting is your problem to solve alone, and if something breaks, help arrives in a time zone that is asleep when you stream. None of that is a scandal; it is simply what happens when a tool was never designed for Georgia.

Donator starts from the opposite end. Georgian banks, the lari, and local support are the default, not an afterthought bolted on later.

Is it really just three percent, and where is the catch? The 3% platform fee on the base amount is the whole story, you keep 97%, and nothing is hidden behind it. Do my viewers need an account? No, they pay as guests with a card in one tap. Is a foreign card going to be rejected? No, Visa and Mastercard from abroad are accepted the same as local ones.

What if I only stream sometimes? That is fine, there is no quota and no penalty for a quiet week. What about safety? Card details are entered on a secure page, and you never see or handle them yourself. The most common worry, that support will get eaten by fees, is the one Donator is built to remove.

Being paid in your own currency, into your own bank, in your own country changes how support feels. You can plan around it, budget materials against it, and declare it cleanly, because it never left the Georgian system to begin with.

TBC and Bank of Georgia are names your bank app already knows, and payouts to them clear fast. There is no exotic middle layer, no surprise hold, and no explaining to a support agent abroad why a transfer from Batumi looks unusual to them.

For a Georgian maker, that grounding is the quiet advantage: the tool speaks your financial language, so you can spend your energy on the craft.

Many streamers search DonationAlerts or Streamlabs when they want setup or an alternative. For crafts money transfers in Georgia, GEL payout is often the real friction.

On Donator the OBS alert shows right away, viewers pay with any card, and money goes to TBC or Bank of Georgia. You can keep the same alert habit and fix payouts locally.

Many streamers start with DonationAlerts or Streamlabs, because those are the names people type when they search for an OBS donation alert, a donation page, or an alternative to a foreign tool. StreamElements often shows up in the same shortlist.

In Georgia those products are often built for other markets: foreign wallets, awkward withdrawals, or fees that never land cleanly in GEL. Patreon and PayPal still fit some creator formats, but they do not always replace live stream donations with payout to a Georgian bank.

Donator is built so a viewer can pay with any card, Georgian or foreign, the alert can show in OBS right away, and the money settles in GEL to TBC or Bank of Georgia. If you already used DonationAlerts or Streamlabs, you can keep the same alert habit and fix payouts locally.