Donorbox vs Tap.Giving: 5-Year Cost Compared (2026)

The Short Answer (Read This First)

Donorbox and Tap.Giving are different layers of the stack. Donorbox is an online giving platform: it processes payments, manages recurring gifts, generates tax receipts, and deposits money in your church's bank. Tap.Giving sells NFC tap plates: round, custom-printed discs with a tiny chip that opens a phone to the giving page you already have. We are hardware, not a payment processor.

Over five years, a 200-seat church on Donorbox's Free plan with Tap.Giving plates spends $800 once for the plates plus Donorbox's normal platform and processing fees. 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 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?"

Donorbox Pricing in 2026

Donorbox publishes a tiered model: a Free plan paid for by a small percentage of each gift, plus paid subscriptions that lower the platform fee in exchange for a monthly subscription. Payment processing runs through Stripe or PayPal and is billed separately from the platform fee. Use the figures below as a directional reference and confirm current numbers on the Donorbox pricing page before signing.

Source: Donorbox public pricing page as of 2026. Confirm current rates before purchase. For a sibling comparison against another freemium platform, see our GivingFuel vs Donorbox breakdown for small churches.

The thing to watch on any freemium giving platform is that the fee never disappears. It moves from a monthly invoice to a percentage on each gift, plus a separate processor charge. Adding NFC tap plates does not change any of that. The plates simply open the same Donorbox page, and Donorbox 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.

5-Year Total Cost: A 200-Seat Church

Here is the dollar math for a 200-seat church running 200 plates and around $150,000 a year in digital giving, with a 75/25 split between card and ACH gifts. The Donorbox platform fee is pulled from the publicly listed Free plan rate, and Stripe's nonprofit 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 Donorbox's bill. The 1.5% platform fee and the Stripe processing fee stay the same. 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.

Donorbox TapTag vs Tap.Giving Plates

Donorbox sells its own NFC product, the TapTag, as a small adhesive disc that links to a Donorbox campaign. The chip standard is the same as ours, so the user experience inside the phone is identical: tap, see the giving page, pay. The differences live in the form factor, the branding, and the bulk price.

TapTags are a clean fit for a small nonprofit running one or two campaign tags at events. For a Sunday-morning room with 200 seats, the math changes fast. A church-scale order of NFC tap plates is the cheapest per-seat way to put tap to give in front of every attendee, and the plates are not locked to a single back end. Other NFC tags for churches, including generic stickers and disc-style tap tags for churches, tend to land in the same place: fine as singles, expensive at congregation scale. Switch from Donorbox to Tithely, Pushpay, or Subsplash later and our plates still work; we just re-encode the URL if needed.

Feature Comparison

Because Donorbox 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 setup on Donorbox specifically, our Donorbox tap-to-give setup guide walks through finding the right URL and ordering plates.

When to Pick Donorbox Anyway

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

• You run a nonprofit alongside the church and want one platform for both, with peer-to-peer campaigns and event ticketing under one roof.
• You need a Free plan with no monthly subscription and you accept a small platform fee per gift in exchange.
• You want hosted donation pages that look polished without a designer, plus a checkout that supports Apple Pay and Google Pay out of the box.
• You need text to give, a kiosk mode, and crowdfunding-style giving campaigns inside the same dashboard.

Even then, 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, see our NFC giving explained guide.

FAQ: Donorbox and Tap.Giving Questions