Anedot vs Tap.Giving: Processor vs Hardware (2026)

The Short Answer (Read This First)

Anedot and Tap.Giving sit at different layers of the giving stack. Anedot is a payment processor and hosted donation platform: it builds the page, runs the card, sends the receipt, and deposits the gift in your bank. Tap.Giving sells NFC tap plates: 4-inch printed discs with a tiny chip that opens a phone to whatever giving page you already have. We are hardware, not a payment processor.

Over five years, a 200-seat church on Anedot with Tap.Giving plates spends $800 once on hardware plus whatever Anedot charges for processing. The plates add tap to give, tap to donate, and contactless giving in service without adding a monthly bill. The honest question is rarely "which one do I buy?" It is "which giving platform handles the back end, and how does the church add an in-service NFC giving moment without changing it?"

Anedot Pricing in 2026

Anedot publishes a tiered model: a pay-as-you-go option where the platform fee plus card processing comes out of each gift, and higher tiers with a monthly subscription that reduce the per-gift percentage. Card processing runs through their own processor and ACH is offered at a lower rate. Use the figures below as a directional reference and confirm current numbers on the Anedot pricing page before signing.

Source: Anedot public pricing page as of 2026. Confirm current rates before purchase. For a step-by-step on encoding plates to an Anedot form, see our Anedot tap-to-give setup guide.

The thing to notice on any pay-as-you-go giving platform is that the cost never disappears, it just moves. On the Free plan, a small platform percentage comes out of every gift, on top of card processing. On a Pro plan, the percentage drops but a monthly subscription appears. Adding NFC tap plates does not change any of that. The plates simply open the same Anedot page, and Anedot charges the same fee whether the giver arrived by tap, scan, or typed URL.

Tap.Giving Pricing in 2026

Our pricing has one shape: a per-plate price, one time, with free shipping. There is no monthly fee, no setup fee, and no transaction fee from us. Quantity drives the rate.

Promo code WELCOME10 takes 10% off the first order. The plates ship with adhesive backing, pre-drilled screw holes, and a QR code printed on the front for any phone that cannot read NFC. Full pricing detail is on our pricing page, and the quick math is on our cost calculator.

5-Year Total Cost: A 200-Seat Church

Here is the dollar math for a 200-seat church running 200 plates and about $150,000 a year in digital giving, with a 75/25 split between card and ACH gifts. The Anedot platform fee is pulled from the publicly listed pay-as-you-go rate, and a standard 2.9% + $0.30 card processing rate is applied to card gifts. Numbers are rounded and conservative.

The plates add about $800 to a five-year window, or roughly $160 a year, in exchange for moving in-service giving from cash and check to mobile gifts. Churches using NFC tap plates have reported donation lift of 300% or more in service, with 81% of attendees willing to give in service when a tap option is available versus 24% who actually give without one. Tap to give is about 42 times more engaging than printed QR codes. If even a small share of seated givers shifts from cash to a mobile gift, $800 of hardware pays for itself well inside year one.

Nothing about adding plates raises Anedot's bill. The platform fee and the card processing rate stay the same. The plates just open the same giving page faster, and for the 53% of NFC givers who are first-time givers, that friction drop is the whole game. This is the cheapest layer of church giving technology you can add without renegotiating a subscription. For a deeper take on why hardware-led giving beats more subscription tools, see our hidden costs of church giving platforms breakdown.

Feature Comparison

Because Anedot and Tap.Giving sit at different layers of the stack, this is more "what each one does" than "winner take all." Mark the row that matters most to your church.

For a side-by-side against more giving platforms, see our 2026 guide to the best online giving platforms for churches or our tap-to-give platform comparison. For a sibling write-up on a freemium processor, see our Donorbox vs Tap.Giving breakdown.

Why Most Churches Run Both Together

The cleanest mental model is to treat Anedot as the bank teller and Tap.Giving as the front door. Anedot handles the boring, regulated work: PCI compliance, recurring schedules, bank deposits, donor records, and tax receipts. Tap.Giving handles the in-service moment when a guest in row five wants to give and does not feel like fishing a wallet out of a jacket. NFC tap plates open the Anedot donation form in roughly 8 seconds, no app required and no QR code to fumble with.

The same logic applies whether the back end is Anedot, Tithely, Pushpay, Subsplash, Donorbox, Givelify, Planning Center Giving, or Nucleus Giving. Tap tags for churches in general work the same way: they encode a URL and hand it to a phone. Where church-purpose plates differ from generic NFC tags for churches is the branding, the form factor, the mounting hardware, and the bulk economics for a 200-seat or 500-seat room. For more on that, see our complete guide to church NFC tags and our piece on DIY NFC giving with no monthly fees.

A church plant on Anedot pay-as-you-go often pairs 100 plates ($450 with the WELCOME10 discount even lower) with their existing form, and that is the entire giving stack: a hosted form for online and recurring, NFC tap plates for in-service. Larger churches scale the same setup with 200, 400, or 600 plates. The plates are deliberately platform-agnostic so the church can switch processors later without rebuying hardware. For a walk-through of how the giver actually experiences it, our plain-English explainer on how tap to give works covers the eight-second flow end to end.

When to Pick Anedot Anyway

Honest carve-out: situations where Anedot is the clear choice on the back end.

• You want a hosted donation form with a clean checkout, peer-to-peer pages, and event ticketing inside one dashboard.
• You need a pay-as-you-go model with no monthly subscription and you accept a small per-gift platform fee in exchange.
• You run a related nonprofit, political action committee, or campaign and want one provider for both the church and the organization.
• You want native ACH and card support, with Apple Pay and Google Pay on the form so most gifts complete in seconds.

Even in those cases, NFC tap plates still make sense the moment the offering window opens on a Sunday. Hardware that costs $800 once and never asks for a renewal is a low-stakes addition to any back end. For a fuller picture of how tap and give plays out across denominations and church sizes, see our NFC giving explained guide and the how it works walkthrough.

FAQ: Anedot and Tap.Giving Questions