What giving platforms actually cost your church

A church treasurer told me his online giving cost “about three percent.” His church received $410,000 online that year, almost all of it on cards. Three percent of $410,000 is $12,300, which is a part-time children’s director. He had never seen the number written as a dollar amount, only as a percentage in a contract.

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.

Verified fees, checked 28 July 2026

Every figure below came off the vendor’s own public pricing page on that date. 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, $239 for unlimited.

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 $599 one time.

Givelify. 2.9 percent plus $0.30 on Visa, Mastercard, and Discover, 3.5 percent plus $0.30 on American Express. No monthly fee, no signup fee. Givelify’s fee schedule as published does not include an ACH option, which matters more than the headline rate.

Subsplash Giving. 2.3 percent plus $0.30 on cards and 1 percent on ACH, with $0 monthly. Subsplash advertises reduced rates for eligible churches through a program it calls GrowCurve, as low as 1.9 percent plus $0.30 on cards and 0.5 percent on ACH. Ask exactly what qualifies a church and what happens if you stop qualifying.

Stripe, if your church builds its own giving page or uses a platform that sits on top of Stripe: 2.9 percent plus $0.30 for domestic cards, an extra 1.5 percent for international cards, an extra 0.5 percent for manually keyed cards. ACH direct debit is 0.8 percent with a $5.00 cap, which makes a $5,000 wire-style gift cost $5 instead of $145.

Notice that the ACH cap is the single largest lever in the whole table for a church that receives occasional large gifts.

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 tax-deductible contribution 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.

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. A statement that omits the required no-goods-or-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.

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, and if you are also evaluating the office side, start with choosing church management software.