GoFundMe, a community-powered fundraising platform for individuals and nonprofits, was facing password-driven friction and user drop-offs during account creation. Learn why GoFundMe chose to switch to Descope and migrate millions of users towards a more seamless and secure experience while saving developer time.
About GoFundMe
GoFundMe is the global leader in online fundraising for individuals and nonprofits, with a global community of more than 200 million across 20 countries. The platform provides an end-to-end suite that enables anyone to raise money for personal, charitable, or community causes.
GoFundMe users make an average of 2.5 donations every second
Over $40 billion in individual and nonprofit donations have been raised since the company’s inception in 2010
Nearly 80 million donations in 2025
In addition to individual givers, GoFundMe helps improve discoverability and donor acquisition for thousands of registered nonprofit organizations. With GoFundMe Pro, nonprofits get a range of capabilities, such as high performing fundraising tools, customizable branded campaigns, live event management, and donor intelligence, to help these organizations raise more for their missions.
Eliminating user friction
Low-friction onboarding, registration, and return visits are critical to GoFundMe’s growth. As they scaled, GoFundMe started facing higher rates of user drop-offs and had to invest more engineering time on maintaining and enhancing their authentication infrastructure.
GoFundMe welcomes an average of 100 million monthly visitors, but only a fraction of them were registered users. Their team also noticed drop-offs during account creation and sign-in, in which users would abandon the process – likely due to password fatigue and forgotten credentials. Given that GoFundMe provided username-password as the only authentication option, supplementing them with passwordless options to encourage easier signup was a priority.
GoFundMe analyzed whether auth modernization initiatives were better handled in-house or by choosing a specialized CIAM provider. After some deliberation, they decided on the latter because it would allow them to refocus developer time on core product initiatives rather than identity maintenance and expertise.
Brian Gebel, Senior Engineering Manager at GoFundMe, said:
“We considered the build-or-buy decision in terms of time to market and total cost of ownership. Ultimately, we decided that our developers’ time would be better spent on developing new GoFundMe features and maintaining existing features. Once you get past the initial deployment investment, a dedicated CIAM provider provides more value at lower cost.”
The Descope experience
Descope’s CIAM platform helped GoFundMe simplify and secure user onboarding while creating omnichannel user journeys across web and mobile – all while saving developer time and resourcing.
Low-friction auth: GoFundMe supplemented password-based authentication with more user-friendly options like Google and Apple OAuth social logins, as well as One Tap authentication. Giving users the freedom to choose how they wanted to create their GoFundMe accounts lowered the barrier to entry, improving metrics for both account creation and return visits. GoFundMe was also able to use Descope’s native mobile auth SDKs to offer seamless auth without disruptive redirects on their iOS and Android apps.
No / low code user journeys: Drag & drop Descope Flows helped the GoFundMe product, engineering, design, and identity teams design and iterate on user journeys together. Since Descope Flows needed to be integrated into GoFundMe’s apps only once, their team could progressively add new auth methods and modify the user journey without touching application code.
Extensibility and scale: GoFundMe used the Descope connectors ecosystem to harmonize data and actions across third-party tools from within the user journey. Use cases included login risk detection with reCAPTCHA, capturing and disseminating user signals with mParticle, sending SMS one-time passcodes with Twilio Verify, and streaming identity logs and audit events with Amazon S3. Descope’s localization capabilities translated user-facing screens to provide a personalized experience for donors around the globe.
CI / CD: To ensure that Descope’s user journey workflows acted in lockstep with the rest of GoFundMe’s software development lifecycle (SDLC), they utilized Descope’s GitHub CI / CD template to facilitate smooth transitions from development to testing to production environments.
Support and collaboration: Descope developer relations and customer success experts acted as an extension of GoFundMe’s team, from discussing architectural considerations and planning use cases to implementing the migration strategy and fulfilling ongoing feature requests.
Saurabh Pareek, Senior Director of Product at GoFundMe, said:
“Descope made a positive impact across the board – from streamlining the user and partner onboarding experience to improving our experience when implementing IAM initiatives. The Descope team is a pleasure to work with, always going the extra mile and being genuinely invested in our success.”
Just-in-time migration
Migrating millions of user identities can pose a lot of hurdles and cause downtime if not thought through. GoFundMe decided to leverage Descope’s hybrid migration capabilities to adopt a more gradual approach to migration without adding risk and complexity.
Just-in-time migration meant existing GoFundMe users were logged in without realizing anything changed under the hood. Meanwhile, new users got an enhanced signup experience with a range of auth methods to choose from.
Helping people help each other
GoFundMe exists to help people help each other. Descope is proud to have played a small part in GoFundMe’s mission by making it easier for new users to onboard and returning users to log in, unifying auth experiences across web and mobile, and refocusing the GoFundMe team’s time towards core product initiatives.
Arnie Katz, Chief Product and Technology Officer at GoFundMe, said:
“Moving to Descope from our home-grown authentication implementation has been a game-changer for our engineering and product teams. The building-block nature of their platform helps us go live and iterate quickly on identity journeys, helping us provide frictionless and omnichannel user experiences while saving developer time.”
Descope is a flexible drag & drop CIAM platform that helps organizations easily add authentication, authorization, and identity management to their apps, AI agents, and MCP servers. Customers use us for initiatives such as passwordless authentication, SSO, identity federation, strong MFA, fraud prevention, and agentic identity.
To get started with Descope, sign up for a Free Forever account. If you have questions about our platform, book time with our auth experts.
