Best giving platform for churches under 100 people
Tithe.ly, Subsplash, Nucleus, MyWell, and Planning Center compared for churches under 100 people—vendor-verified fees and the ACH math that changes the pick.
The Generosity.co editors ·
Most giving-platform comparisons are written for organizations that don't look like yours. They assume a development director, a $30 average donation, and thousands of transactions a month. A 60-person congregation has none of that—and the differences aren't cosmetic. They flip which platform is actually cheapest.
If you're a nonprofit rather than a church, read our small-nonprofit comparison instead; the math there runs differently. This page is for the church where the treasurer is a volunteer, Sunday attendance fits in one room, and nobody has time to become a payments expert.
Why your math is different
Four things separate a small church from the generic "small organization" these platforms picture:
Your average gift is larger. A congregation that tithes produces gifts of $100, $200, $500—not the $25 one-time donations that nonprofit fundraising math assumes. Percentage fees scale with gift size, so a 2.9% fee costs a tithing church far more per gift than it costs a donation-drive nonprofit. Flat per-transaction fees, meanwhile, become rounding errors.
Your volume is lower. Sixty people might produce 40 to 80 gifts a month. Platforms priced by transaction count put you in the cheapest tier; platforms priced by percentage take the same bite no matter how few gifts you process.
Your treasurer is a volunteer. Anything that requires reconciling three reports or maintaining a merchant account will quietly stop being maintained. Simplicity is not a nice-to-have—it's the difference between a system that works in month eighteen and one that doesn't.
You may not be a separately registered nonprofit. Churches are automatically tax-exempt under federal law and never have to file for 501(c)(3) status. Many small congregations operate under a denomination's group exemption or under no separate registration at all. That's fine for the IRS—but it disqualifies you from at least one platform, which is where we'll start.
The free option most small churches can't use
Zeffy charges 0%—no platform fee, no processing fee, funded by optional donor tips (verified July 2026). We recommend it often, and it pays us nothing. But Zeffy is available only to registered US and Canadian nonprofits (verified July 2026), and it has no church-management integration. If your church never filed its own registration, or sits under denominational cover you'd have to untangle, Zeffy is off the table—and if you're not sure of your status, find out before you build your giving system on it.
If your church is separately registered and you're comfortable with a tip prompt at checkout, read our full Zeffy review before anything below—free is hard to beat. For how tip-funded platforms work and where the catch is, we've written that up separately too. Everyone else, keep reading.
The low-friction default: Tithe.ly Free Giving
Tithe.ly's Free Giving plan is $0 per month with 2.9% + 30¢ on cards, 3.5% + 30¢ on Amex, and 1% + 30¢ on ACH bank transfers. One honesty note: those figures are consistent across four secondary sources citing Tithe.ly's pricing page as of July 2026, but we could not retrieve them from Tithe.ly directly—confirm on their site before you sign. Donors can opt to cover the fees, and if you later want church management software, Tithe.ly sells a Giving + Church Management bundle at $72 per month (same July 2026 caveat).
Why it's the default: no subscription, no contract, church-specific features out of the box, and a setup a volunteer can finish in an afternoon. The rate is unremarkable. The friction is the lowest in the category, and for a church whose whole giving operation is one busy person, that counts for a lot.
The other $0/month option: Subsplash Giving
Subsplash Giving as a standalone product is also $0 per month, at 2.99% + 30¢ on Visa and Mastercard, 3.5% + 30¢ on premium cards, and 1% on ACH (verified July 2026, from Subsplash's own documentation). Two things to know. First, the better advertised rates—2.30% + 30¢ with an Exclusive Partnership, and volume rebates that can reach 1.9% on cards and 0.5% on ACH—require committing to Subsplash, so we price the rate you get without a contract. Second, Subsplash's real pitch is its all-in-one suite: church app, media hosting, streaming. If you want those eventually, starting with their giving product makes sense. If you only want giving, it's Tithe.ly's rate structure with a fractionally higher card rate and no donor fee-cover option confirmed.
The philosophy question: Nucleus
Nucleus runs a model worth discussing at a leadership meeting, not just comparing on a spreadsheet. The church pays a flat subscription and receives 100% of every gift. The processing cost—2.7% on cards, a flat 25¢ on ACH (verified July 2026)—is passed to the donor automatically and mandatorily. Not as an optional checkbox. The church cannot choose to absorb it.
In a nonprofit's donor base, a mandatory fee on strangers is a real conversion risk. In a congregation, it's a different conversation—these are your members, and a pastor can stand up and explain that the church now receives every dollar of every tithe, and the 25¢ it costs to give by bank account is less than the stamp people used to put on the envelope. Whether that framing sits well with your congregation is a question only you can answer, and it's the actual decision here.
The missing piece: Nucleus does not publish its subscription pricing. Get the number from them directly before comparing—a flat fee that's reasonable at $15,000 a month in giving can be unreasonable at $4,000.
When a subscription beats a percentage: MyWell
MyWell Ministry prices the opposite way from everyone above: a monthly tier set by your gift count, with processing passed through at cost. For 1–100 gifts a month—which covers nearly every church this page is for—the tier is $49 per month. Processing is interchange with 0% markup, which MyWell cites as roughly 1.33% on average across debit and credit cards; ACH is 0%; everything carries a flat 30¢ per transaction (all figures from MyWell's pricing page, updated July 2026). A donor cover-the-costs option exists and is genuinely optional.
Here's the math for a church giving $10,000 a month across 60 card gifts: MyWell costs $49 + ~$133 in processing + $18 in per-transaction fees—about $200, or 2.0% effective. Tithe.ly's published rate on the same month is about $308. That's roughly $1,300 a year of difference, and it widens as giving grows or shifts to ACH. The tradeoff is the $49 floor: in a lean month, you pay it anyway. If your gift count is steady, the subscription wins. If giving is small or erratic, it doesn't. Our fee calculator will run your actual numbers against both architectures in about a minute.
MyWell also integrates with Planning Center, Rock RMS, and TouchPoint—rare at this price.
If you already live in Planning Center
If your church runs on Planning Center for check-ins, services, or people, Planning Center Giving is a module of the suite you already know. Processing is 2.15% + 30¢ on US cards including Amex, and a flat 30¢ on ACH with 0% percentage fee (verified July 2026, from Planning Center directly). The subscription scales by donation count: free up to 10 donations a month, $15 per month for up to 75, $32 per month for up to 200. A 60-person church lands in the $15 tier. That's a low subscription, a genuinely low card rate, and one of the cheapest ACH rates in the category—inside a system your volunteers already use. If you're in Planning Center, this is your answer and you can stop reading.
The biggest lever isn't the platform—it's the bank account
Every platform on this page charges dramatically less for ACH bank transfers than for cards. On a $200 tithe:
| Platform | Card fee | ACH fee | Verified |
|---|---|---|---|
| Tithe.ly | $6.10 (2.9% + 30¢) | $2.30 (1% + 30¢) | Jul 2026* |
| Subsplash Giving | $6.28 (2.99% + 30¢) | $2.00 (1%) | Jul 2026 |
| MyWell | $2.96 (~1.33% + 30¢) | $0.30 (0% + 30¢) | Jul 2026 |
| Planning Center | $4.60 (2.15% + 30¢) | $0.30 (0% + 30¢) | Jul 2026 |
| Nucleus (donor pays) | $5.40 added (2.7%) | $0.25 added (25¢) | Jul 2026 |
*Tithe.ly figures from secondary sources citing their pricing page—confirm directly.
Nonprofits mostly can't act on this table, because you can't ask a stranger mid-donation to go find their routing number. A congregation is the one audience that will actually switch. These are recurring gifts from committed people, and when the pastor explains—once, plainly—that a tithe given by bank account costs the church a tenth of what a card gift costs, people move their recurring gift. A church processing $10,000 a month that shifts most giving from cards to ACH saves real money on every platform above—on some, over $2,000 a year. Whatever platform you pick, make the ACH ask. It outweighs most of the differences between the platforms themselves. For the full picture of what these percentages cost over a year, see what platform fees actually cost you.
Our pick, by scenario
- You already use Planning Center: Planning Center Giving. $15 a month at your size, 2.15% + 30¢ cards, 30¢ flat ACH, zero new systems to learn.
- You're a registered 501(c)(3) and can live with tip prompts: Zeffy, because 0% is 0%—read the review first.
- Steady gift counts and a treasurer willing to check the math once: MyWell. At typical small-church volume, $49 a month plus at-cost processing beats every percentage platform here, and ACH at 0% + 30¢ makes the bank-account ask even more valuable.
- Your leadership believes donors should cover the cost, openly: Nucleus—but only after they've quoted you the subscription, because they don't publish it.
- Everyone else: Tithe.ly Free Giving. Not the cheapest rate on this page, but the shortest path from nothing to working online giving, with no monthly fee while you're small and an upgrade path if you grow.
If we had to pick one move for a typical church under 100 with no existing software commitments: start on Tithe.ly Free Giving this week, make the ACH ask from the pulpit next month, and revisit MyWell once your monthly gift count is steady—that's the point where the $49 subscription starts paying for itself. The rest of this pillar covers the platforms we left out here, and the fee calculator will tell you in one minute whether your numbers have crossed the line.