Kickstarter adds a pay-over-time option and a bunch of other new features for 2025

Kickstarter has laid out a roadmap of new tools and features for both backers and creators that will be coming to the crowdfunding platform in 2025. The star of the show, for backers anyway — and potentially for creators too — is Pledge Over Time, a feature that will allow backers to spread out their pledge payment over four instalments.

When a creator enables Pledge Over Time for their campaign, backers will be able to split the pledge into four equal payments, taken automatically every two weeks. Kickstarter’s hope is that this will give backers more flexibility to choose higher reward tiers, or to back bigger and more ambitious projects.

By offering a flexible payment option, Kickstarter is following in the footsteps of rival crowdfunding platforms Backerkit and Gamefound, which have both added similar features recently.

The first projects offering Pledge Over Time are already live on Kickstarter. They include Rock Manor Games’ starship simulator game StarDriven: Gateway, a second printing of Mighty Boards’ co-op board game Fateforge: Chronicles of Kaan, and this rather lovely Astarion-inspired dice set by Brother Ming Games. Like most of Kickstarter’s new features, Pledge Over Time is limited to select creators now, but will be available to all creators later this year — in this case, by spring.

Elsewhere, Kickstarter promised an overhaul of search and discoverability aimed at making it easier for backers to find projects, including new filters and sorting options. There will also be some improvements to the Backing Dashboard, where backers can track all the projects they’ve supported.

Aware that some backers have had their fingers burned on projects that didn’t pan out, Kickstarter is also hoping to build trust with a set of features that should flag risky projects sooner. These will include notices on the project pages of campaigns that have faced “significant fulfillment failures”; more details about a creator’s track record and past projects on the project page; and strengthened vetting and monitoring on Kickstarter’s side.

As far as creators are concerned, Kickstarter is adding a much-requested suite of integrated, in-house Pledge Management tools. The six-step Pledge Manager will be part of the creator dashboard and will add features like post-campaign add-ons, an enhanced backer survey, simplified shipping management, and tax collection.