ACH vs. Card: The Giving Fee Math Most Churches Get Wrong

Every online giving platform leads with its processing rate, and every church finance committee ends up comparing those headline numbers like they're the whole story. They're not. The rate that matters isn't the one on the pricing page — it's the blended rate your church actually pays once you know what share of your giving comes in by card versus by bank transfer.

If the fee structure itself is unfamiliar, start with where your digital giving fees actually go.

The two numbers that actually matter

Card processing on most major platforms lands somewhere between 2.1% and 2.9%, plus a flat fee per transaction (usually $0.30). ACH — a direct bank transfer — is dramatically cheaper on almost every platform, often under 1%, and free entirely on some. Planning Center Giving, for instance, offers free ACH alongside its 2.1% + $0.30 card rate. Tithe.ly's published rates run 2.9% + $0.30 for cards and 1% + $0.30 for ACH.

That gap is the whole ballgame. A church where 80% of online giving comes in by card is paying a meaningfully different effective rate than a church that's shifted most of its recurring givers to bank transfer — even on the exact same platform.

Run this math before you switch platforms

• Pull your last 90 days of online giving and split it by payment method (most dashboards show this).
• Multiply your card total by your platform's card rate, and your ACH total by the ACH rate.
• Add the two together and divide by total giving. That's your real blended rate — not the number on the pricing page.

Churches that do this exercise are often surprised to find their "expensive" platform isn't actually the problem — their giving mix is. A platform with a slightly higher card rate but free ACH can easily beat a platform with a lower card rate and no ACH discount, if you can get even a third of your recurring givers to switch to bank transfer.

The easiest fee reduction most churches skip

Before shopping for a new platform, ask your current one whether it supports a one-time nudge for recurring givers to switch from card to ACH — many do, and it's usually a settings change, not a technical project. Moving your top 20 recurring givers from card to ACH often saves more per year than switching platforms entirely, and it doesn't require re-training your congregation on a new giving form.

What to actually compare when you do shop

Beyond the rate itself, three things move the real cost more than people expect: whether the platform charges a flat monthly fee on top of processing (Subsplash's bundled tiers, for example, are worth it only if you're already using the app and website products — not for giving alone), whether it integrates with your ChMS so someone isn't manually reconciling donations every week, and whether declined or expired recurring cards get flagged and followed up automatically. A platform that quietly loses 3% of recurring donors a year to expired cards can cost more than the fee difference you'd save by switching.

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