What giving platforms actually cost your church

A church that receives $410,000 online, almost all of it on cards, at “about three percent,” is paying $12,300 a year to a payment processor. That is a part-time children’s director. The percentage sits in a contract and the dollar figure sits nowhere, so nobody argues about it at a finance meeting.

Percentages hide money. Convert every fee to dollars per year before you compare anything.

Do the arithmetic once

Take last year’s online giving total. Split it into card gifts and bank transfer gifts. Count the number of transactions, not the dollars, because most fee schedules include a flat charge per gift.

The formula for a year:

Annual cost = (online total x percentage rate) + (number of gifts x flat fee) + (monthly platform fee x 12)

A church receiving $250,000 online across 3,000 gifts, all on cards, at 2.9 percent plus 30 cents, pays $7,250 in percentage fees plus $900 in flat fees, so $8,150 before any subscription. The same church at 2.15 percent plus 30 cents pays $5,375 plus $900, so $6,275. The gap is $1,875 a year for identical function.

Now run the version that actually matters. If half that giving moved to ACH bank transfer at zero percent plus 30 cents, the card side drops to $2,688 plus $450, the bank side costs $450, and the total lands near $3,588. Moving giving off cards saves more than switching vendors ever will.

• Planning Center 2.15% + $0.30 card, 0% + $0.30 ACH
• Tithely 2.9% + $0.30 card, 1% + $0.30 ACH
• Stripe 2.9% + $0.30 card, 0.8% ACH capped at $5
• Givelify no bank transfer named on its pricing page

One church: $250,000 online across 3,000 gifts, an average gift of $83.33, with the card and bank counts moving together. Every rate was read off the vendor's own pricing page on 29 July 2026 and run through the formula above. Stripe's ACH cap does not bite at this average gift size, and it is what makes a $5,000 bank transfer cost $5 rather than $145. Subsplash at 2.3 percent plus 30 cents on cards and 1 percent on ACH would draw between Planning Center and Tithely. The flat line is the finding: a platform that names no bank-transfer rate is a platform where this lever does not exist.

See the numbers

Vendor	0 percent on ACH	25 percent on ACH	50 percent on ACH	75 percent on ACH	100 percent on ACH
Planning Center	$6,275	$4,931	$3,588	$2,244	$900
Tithely	$8,150	$6,963	$5,775	$4,588	$3,400
Stripe	$8,150	$6,613	$5,075	$3,538	$2,000
Givelify	$8,150	$8,150	$8,150	$8,150	$8,150

Fees read off the pricing pages on 29 July 2026

Every figure below came off the vendor’s own public pricing page on that date, and each is linked so you can check it against today’s. Fee schedules change, so confirm before you sign.

Planning Center Giving. 2.15 percent plus $0.30 per card transaction, 0 percent plus $0.30 per ACH bank transfer, international cards add 1.5 percent. The platform subscription is separate and scales with donation count: free up to 10 donations a month, $15 for 75, $32 for 200, $69 for 500, $115 for 1,000, $179 for 1,500, and $239 for unlimited (Planning Center Giving). The zero percent ACH rate is the lowest bank-transfer figure in this table and it is the reason a Planning Center church should be pushing bank transfer hardest of anyone.

Tithely. 2.9 percent plus $0.30 on credit and debit cards, 3.5 percent plus $0.30 on American Express, 1 percent plus $0.30 on ACH. The Free Giving plan carries no monthly fee. Premium onboarding is a one-time $599 (Tithely pricing).

Givelify. 2.9 percent plus $0.30 on standard cards, 3.5 percent plus $0.30 on American Express, with “no sign-up fees, monthly fees or maintenance costs” and no refund fees. Givelify’s pricing page names Visa, MasterCard, Discover, and American Express and does not mention ACH or bank transfer at all (Givelify pricing). That omission matters more than the headline rate, because the largest saving available to a church is a lever this platform does not appear to offer.

Subsplash Giving. 2.3 percent plus 30 cents on cards, 1 percent on ACH, at $0 a month with no setup cost. A program called GrowCurve reduces eligible churches to “as low as 1.9%” plus 30 cents on cards and “as low as 0.5%” on ACH (Subsplash pricing). The page does not print what qualifies a church for GrowCurve. Ask exactly what the criteria are, ask what happens if you stop meeting them, and get the answer in writing before you migrate a recurring donor base.

Stripe, if your church builds its own giving page or uses a platform sitting on top of Stripe: 2.9 percent plus 30 cents for domestic cards, an extra 1.5 percent for international cards, an extra 0.5 percent for manually entered cards, and ACH Direct Debit at 0.8 percent with a $5.00 cap (Stripe pricing). That cap is the single largest lever in the whole table. A $5,000 gift by bank transfer costs $5 through Stripe and $145 on a 2.9 percent card rate.

One thing no page in this set publishes: what it costs to leave. Ask before you sign, and ask the same question of the office system using the export test in choosing church management software.

Push ACH, and push it specifically

Card giving is the default because the button is easier. Changing that takes communication rather than a new platform.

What works: one sentence in the giving instructions that names the dollar amount. “Giving by bank transfer instead of card sends about $29 more of every $1,000 to the church.” That is concrete, checkable, and it moves people. A generic “consider using ACH” does not.

What also works: making bank transfer the first option on the form and the card the second, and setting the default to bank transfer for recurring gifts. Recurring donors set it once and never revisit it, so the default you choose on setup day is the fee you pay for years.

What does not work: shaming card users from the pulpit. Some people use a card because it is the account they can see, and some because the card is the only account they have.

The cover-the-fee checkbox

Most platforms offer a checkbox letting donors add the processing fee to their gift. Use it, with two rules.

First, the checkbox is unchecked by default. A pre-checked box that quietly increases someone’s charge is the kind of thing that ends up in a screenshot.

Second, the receipt has to show the split. The donor gave $100 and covered $3.20 in fees, so the total contribution on the statement is $103.20 and the church nets $100. Get your accountant’s ruling on how your platform reports this before your first January, because cleaning it up after statements go out is miserable.

The IRS rules your statements have to satisfy

Two thresholds decide what the church owes a donor in writing, and platform defaults do not always meet them.

$250. A donor claiming a deduction of $250 or more “is also required to obtain and keep a contemporaneous written acknowledgment,” and to be contemporaneous it “must generally be obtained by the donor no later than the date the donor files the return for the year the contribution is made.” The acknowledgment “must state whether the donee provides any goods or services in consideration for the contribution,” with a good faith estimate of value where any were provided (IRS, Substantiating charitable contributions). Pull a sample statement out of any platform you are evaluating and look for that sentence. If it is missing, you are the one who has to add it, every January, to every statement.

$75. A church “must provide a written disclosure statement to donors of a quid pro quo contribution in excess of $75.” Any gift where the donor received something back, a banquet seat, a book, a concert ticket, crosses into this rule, and only the excess over the value received is deductible.

Designated funds. A gift to the building fund or the missions fund is directed money and the church holds it for that purpose. A gift routed to a named person is a different thing and is not deductible at all: “You can’t deduct contributions to specific individuals,” and “You can’t deduct these contributions even if you make them to a qualified organization for the benefit of a specific person” (IRS, Publication 526). Benevolence is where this bites. A donor who writes “for the Harper family” on a memo line has not made a deductible gift, and a receipt that implies otherwise is the church’s problem, not the donor’s. Take benevolence gifts to the benevolence fund, let the deacons decide who receives, and say so in the giving instructions.

This is the question to ask a vendor rather than a rate question: does the platform keep a fund designation attached through export, and does its year-end statement carry the goods-and-services language. Fund tracking that breaks on export lands in the accounting system next, and church accounting software covers what happens downstream. If a capital campaign is what prompted all this, the announcement and receipting sequence is in communicating a building project without losing the room.

Six questions before you sign

1. Who is the merchant of record? Are you contracting with the processor, or is the platform reselling payments and holding your money in its own account? This determines who can freeze funds and who you call at 9pm when a payout does not land.
2. How long until money hits the church bank account? Two business days is normal. Seven days means someone is earning float on your offering.
3. What happens on a chargeback? Flat fee amount, who handles the dispute, whether the platform debits your account without notice.
4. Can I export the full donor and donation history myself, as CSV, without a support ticket? Same question as with a management system, and the same warning if the answer is soft.
5. How do designated funds work? Building fund, missions, benevolence. Ask whether restricted gifts export with their designation intact and whether a donor can split one gift across funds. Broken fund tracking causes real accounting problems and occasionally real legal ones.
6. What do year-end statements look like? Ask for a sample PDF and check it against the two thresholds above. A statement that omits the goods-and-services language, or that reports the donor’s gross including covered fees when your accountant expects net, creates work in the month you have the least.
7. Where do the card numbers live? They should live with the processor and nowhere in your building, because PCI DSS scope follows anyone who stores, processes, or transmits cardholder data. The rest of that discipline is in protecting the data a church holds about its members.

Where the fee is not the point

Two situations where paying more is correct.

A church already running Planning Center for people, services, and check-ins gets real value from giving inside the same system, because reconciliation stops being a manual join between two databases. That integration is worth a fee gap of a few hundred dollars a year.

A church with one volunteer bookkeeper and no staff should buy the simplest possible thing with the cleanest statements, even at a higher rate. The cheapest platform in the world costs more if it produces January chaos.

And one situation where paying more is wrong: a bundled contract where giving is priced inside a suite you cannot separate. If the vendor will not quote giving as a standalone line, you cannot compare it, which is the point of bundling it. Ask for the line item in writing.

Do this in the next two weeks

Pull the last twelve months of online giving. Write down the total, the transaction count, and the card-versus-ACH split. Run the formula for your current platform and for one alternative. Bring both numbers, in dollars, to the next elders or finance meeting on one page.

Then, whatever you decide about vendors, rewrite the giving page to name the ACH savings in dollars. That change costs nothing and usually returns more than the switch would have.

Compare current options in the giving platform directory. If you are also evaluating the office side, start with choosing church management software, check what the free tiers actually include in free church management software, and take the fund side into church accounting software. If a vendor is trying to sell you giving inside an app bundle, price the app separately with a church app buys one thing.

Sources

• Planning Center Giving, 2.15 percent plus $0.30 card, 0 percent plus $0.30 ACH, subscription tiers by donation count. Checked 29 July 2026.
• Tithely pricing, 2.9 percent plus $0.30 card, 3.5 percent plus $0.30 AMEX, 1 percent plus $0.30 ACH, $599 one-time onboarding. Checked 29 July 2026.
• Givelify pricing, 2.9 percent plus $0.30, 3.5 percent plus $0.30 AMEX, no monthly or signup fee, no ACH named. Checked 29 July 2026.
• Subsplash pricing, Giving at $0 per month, 2.3 percent plus 30 cents card, 1 percent ACH, GrowCurve as low as 1.9 percent and 0.5 percent. Checked 29 July 2026.
• Stripe pricing, 2.9 percent plus 30 cents domestic, plus 1.5 percent international, plus 0.5 percent manually entered, ACH Direct Debit 0.8 percent capped at $5.00. Checked 29 July 2026.
• IRS, Substantiating charitable contributions. Checked 29 July 2026.
• IRS, Publication 526, Charitable Contributions. Checked 29 July 2026.

Nothing here is tax advice. The thresholds are quoted from IRS pages so a treasurer can take them to an accountant, not so a treasurer can skip one.