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See also: ChatGPT Plugins, ChatGPT Plugin Categories and Charity
Charity ChatGPT Plugins were a small group of third-party extensions inside ChatGPT that helped the chatbot find, evaluate, and route money toward registered nonprofit organizations and grant programs. The category sat inside the broader ChatGPT Plugins framework operated by OpenAI, which opened in alpha on March 23, 2023, expanded to all ChatGPT Plus subscribers on May 12, 2023, and was wound down between March 19, 2024 and April 9, 2024.[1][2][3][4]
Charity was one of the thinnest tabs in the plugin store. The most prominent entries were Change, a nonprofit discovery and donation routing tool from the San Francisco company GetChange Corp., and CharitySense, a financial and governance lookup service for United States nonprofits. A grant search plugin called FundsDB, focused on funding opportunities in the United Kingdom and India, was sometimes filed under charity in third-party roundups.[5][6][7][8] Across the lifetime of the program, only these three entries were consistently catalogued as charity-focused.[9][10]
The plugins did not make donations directly inside the chat. They exposed search APIs that returned curated lists of organizations or funding programs, with deep links to external donation pages, IRS Form 990 records, or grant application portals. After Custom GPTs replaced the plugin architecture in late 2023 and the GPT Store launched on January 10, 2024, the same vendors rebuilt their charity helpers as GPTs with native Actions, which is the form most charity-focused large language model tools take today.[3][4][11]
OpenAI announced ChatGPT plugins on March 23, 2023, in a blog post titled "ChatGPT plugins," describing them as the company's first plugins for the chatbot and as tools to help ChatGPT "access up to date information, run computations, or use third party services." The launch wave included twelve partner integrations from Expedia, FiscalNote, Instacart, Kayak, Klarna, Milo, OpenTable, Shopify, Slack, Speak, Wolfram, and Zapier, plus two first-party plugins for browsing and a code interpreter. None of the original twelve were charity focused.[1]
Access opened in alpha to ChatGPT Plus subscribers and waitlisted developers. On May 12, 2023, OpenAI announced that web browsing and plugins would become available to all Plus subscribers the following week, and the plugin store opened broadly on May 19, 2023.[2] By the third week of May, third-party trackers were counting roughly seventy approved plugins, growing to several hundred by mid-summer. The earliest charity plugin to appear on those public approval lists was Change, which was present on the canonical May 21, 2023 catalogue compiled by Australian curator Orren Prunckun.[5][7]
CharitySense followed on June 20, 2023, with a manifest contact address tied to the Pakistan-based developer mazhar@sinalabs.org.[6] FundsDB, operated by the United Kingdom and India focused funding aggregator of the same name, appeared in the late May 2023 wave of approved plugins.[8] By the time the plugin store had stabilized at roughly one thousand entries in late 2023, no further charity-only plugins had cleared OpenAI's review process and reached the public catalogue.[12]
On November 6, 2023, at OpenAI's first DevDay, Custom GPTs were unveiled, with Actions presented as the successor to the plugin manifest. The GPT Store opened on January 10, 2024. New plugin installs and new conversations were disabled on March 19, 2024, and existing plugin conversations stopped working on April 9, 2024.[3][4][11]
| Date | Event |
|---|---|
| March 23, 2023 | ChatGPT plugins announced; no charity plugins among the twelve launch partners |
| May 12, 2023 | OpenAI announces broad rollout to ChatGPT Plus |
| May 19, 2023 | Plugin store opens to all Plus subscribers |
| May 21, 2023 | Change present on the public approved plugins list |
| Late May 2023 | FundsDB approved, with grants coverage for the United Kingdom and India |
| June 20, 2023 | CharitySense added, providing United States nonprofit financial data |
| November 6, 2023 | GPTs unveiled at OpenAI DevDay; plugin program effectively superseded |
| January 10, 2024 | GPT Store opens |
| March 19, 2024 | New plugin installs and new chats with plugins disabled |
| April 9, 2024 | Existing plugin conversations stopped working |
All charity plugins followed the standard plugin architecture. Each plugin advertised itself through a manifest file (ai-plugin.json) and an OpenAPI specification that ChatGPT consumed at install time. The GPT-4 model decided whether to call one or more installed plugins, sent structured arguments to the plugin endpoint, received a JSON response, and incorporated that response into the reply to the user. Plus subscribers could enable up to three plugins per conversation, and plugin features were limited to ChatGPT Plus accounts running on GPT-4.[1]
Within those constraints, the charity plugins clustered around three patterns:
None of the three issued payments inside ChatGPT. Donation links opened in a browser tab on the funder's own website, which kept the program clear of payment processing and Know-Your-Customer obligations.
Change was a nonprofit discovery plugin published by GetChange Corp., a San Francisco company founded in 2020 by Sonia Nigam and Amar Shah. The company had previously launched a donations API used by consumer fintech and crypto wallets to route customer-elected gifts to a donor-advised fund called Our Change Foundation, which then disbursed the proceeds to a partner network spanning roughly 1.3 million United States nonprofits.[5][7] The ChatGPT plugin was an extension of that infrastructure: it borrowed the same nonprofit index used by the donations API and exposed it through a search interface tailored for conversational queries.
The plugin manifest description on OpenAI's catalogue read: "Discover impactful nonprofits to support in your community and beyond." GetChange marketed it in a blog post as "the first ChatGPT plugin for social good," emphasizing causes such as ocean conservation, education, healthcare, mental health awareness, and animal welfare. Queries supported geographic filters down to United States zip code level, organizational filters such as top-rated and recently founded, and donation type filters including organizations that accepted in-kind gifts.[5][9] The plugin returned a short ranked list with the nonprofit name, mission statement, and a link back to a donation page hosted by Change or by the nonprofit itself.
Change was present on the public approved-plugin list as early as May 21, 2023, making it the earliest charity plugin in the store. Coverage in third-party reviews focused on Change's positioning as a giving tool for individual donors who wanted to spot legitimate organizations without wading through search engine results. The same nonprofit index continued to power Change's donations API after the plugin was retired in 2024.[5][9]
CharitySense was a research plugin built around a public API at api.charitysense.com. Its OpenAI-listed description was: "Get data on US-based non-profits including mission, key people, governance, ratings and financial data." The plugin exposed two main operations: getCharityByEin, which retrieved detailed records for a single nonprofit by its IRS Employer Identification Number with optional year filters, and getCharityList, which searched the catalogue using filters for ratings, total assets, total liabilities, total expenses, religious affiliation, and explicit EIN lists. Authentication was not required.[6][10]
The data set behind CharitySense was assembled from publicly filed IRS Form 990 returns and overlay ratings produced by independent watchdogs. Typical queries asked for the highest-rated environmental charities in a given asset bracket, the leadership and governance section of a single named organization, or a side-by-side comparison of overhead ratios between several nonprofits. The plugin contact email mazhar@sinalabs.org pointed to a developer at Sina Labs, a small data engineering shop based in Pakistan; the plugin appeared in OpenAI's catalogue on June 20, 2023.[6]
CharitySense appeared regularly in plugin roundups during the second half of 2023. It served a different audience than Change: where Change was aimed at first-time donors, CharitySense targeted donors, journalists, advisors, and grant officers who already knew what they were evaluating and wanted structured numbers rather than discovery.[6][10]
FundsDB was a grant-discovery plugin operated by the FundsDB platform, an aggregator of funding opportunities in the United Kingdom and India. Its OpenAI-listed description was: "Discover funding opportunities in UK and India on FundsDB. Type in your query in any language or /help for assistance." Queries returned ranked lists of grants, scholarships, and loans across sectors with optional sorting on minimum or maximum award amount and filtering by total fund size or sector. The plugin advertised support for natural language input in any language, which mapped multilingual queries onto its English language fund index.[8]
FundsDB was less obviously a charity plugin than Change or CharitySense. It indexed both philanthropic grants from foundations and trusts and a smaller stratum of public-sector and commercial funding programs. Most of its index served organizations seeking funding rather than donors seeking causes. Independent reviewers nonetheless filed it under charity, nonprofit, or social good in their roundups because the dominant use case was charity-side fundraising research and because no separate grants category existed in the plugin store taxonomy.[8] FundsDB appeared in the late-May 2023 wave of approved plugins.
Uptake of charity plugins was modest. Plugin trackers maintained by hobbyists and third-party directories listed the three entries above as the recurring charity options through 2023, sometimes appending broader civic and finance plugins under the same heading.[9][10][12] None of the three reached the public spotlight enjoyed by Expedia, Instacart, or Wolfram from the launch wave. Two structural factors limited the category.
First, donation processing itself was outside the plugin scope. OpenAI's policies discouraged plugins from acting as payment intermediaries inside ChatGPT, and the practical engineering of compliant donation flows (Know-Your-Customer checks, receipt issuance, charitable status verification) was heavier than a plugin manifest could accommodate. Charity plugins therefore acted as research and discovery layers that ended at a deep link, leaving the actual gift to a separate web checkout. This pattern was useful but limited compared to plugins like Instacart that could close a transaction inside the chat.[1]
Second, the universe of nonprofits and grant programs is fragmented across legal jurisdictions. Change and CharitySense indexed United States 501(c)(3) organizations using IRS Form 990 records, while FundsDB worked with United Kingdom and India fund programs that have no shared schema. Producing a single global charity plugin was not feasible during the plugin window, and OpenAI's review process favored single, focused plugins rather than ambitious globe-spanning catalogues. As a result, the charity tab remained a coalition of regional plugins rather than a single category leader.[6][8][9]
Reviewers writing for nonprofit audiences during 2023 routinely recommended pairing Change for cause discovery with CharitySense for due diligence, sometimes alongside web browsing or prompt engineering tutorials drawn from the wider ChatGPT literature. Coverage in mainstream nonprofit publications such as Nonprofit Tech for Good and Donorbox tended to focus on writing tasks for which generic ChatGPT was sufficient, mentioning charity plugins mostly as a niche option.[13][14]
OpenAI never published an official taxonomy for the plugin store. The store interface presented a New, Popular, and All filter, plus a small set of categories such as Travel, Shopping, Productivity, and Finance. Charity was not a top-level filter, so charity plugins were typically surfaced through search or curated third-party lists. Independent trackers such as Plugin Surf, Booster Mini Class, and the GitHub project sisbell/chatgpt-plugin-store imposed their own taxonomies, and most carved out a small charity or social good bucket containing the same two or three entries.[6][9][12] This page treats charity as a retrospective grouping aligned with the convention used in nonprofit-sector commentary at the time, on the same basis as the rest of ChatGPT Plugin Categories.
When Custom GPTs were unveiled at OpenAI DevDay on November 6, 2023, the underlying tool-use mechanism shifted from plugins to Actions: each GPT could attach one or more Actions, defined by an OpenAPI specification very similar in shape to the old plugin manifest. The GPT Store opened to ChatGPT Plus, Team, and Enterprise users on January 10, 2024.[3][11]
Charity-focused builders followed the migration. Change rebuilt its discovery surface as a GPT and as a website widget. CharitySense's API at api.charitysense.com remained available, and similar GPTs were published in the GPT Store using the same Form 990 data. New entrants added donor-facing tools, donation valuators for tax purposes, donor outreach drafters, and grant prospect researchers, all combining a large language model with structured data from public charity records or grant directories.
OpenAI's plugin program ended on April 9, 2024. From that date forward, the only OpenAI-hosted way to use a charity-themed extension inside ChatGPT was through GPTs and Actions in the GPT Store. The three plugins discussed above are now of historical interest only; they are referenced here because they were the first wave of dedicated charity tooling shipped inside a major chatbot, and because the plugin manifest format pioneered by their developers became the template for subsequent Actions-based GPTs.[3][4]