Tithely Explained: How It Works for Churches in 2026

The Short Answer: How Tithely Works in 60 Seconds

Tithely is an online giving platform that processes church donations through a hosted giving page, a free mobile app, and text to give. A member picks an amount, pays with a card, ACH bank transfer, Apple Pay, or Google Pay, and the donation is deposited into the church's bank account in 1 to 3 business days for cards and 3 to 7 business days for ACH gifts. The church side sees every donation inside a Tithely dashboard with donor records, recurring schedules, and contribution statements. Tithely has a free Giving tier in 2026, plus paid bundles like Tithely Elevate at about $119 per month.

The platform handles the money. The remaining question for most churches is the in-service moment: how do members give on Sunday morning without typing a URL or scanning a QR code. That is where NFC tap plates pair with Tithely. Plates open the same Tithely giving page in 8 seconds when a phone is held near them, no app required, no second platform. The result is tap to give on top of the giving system you already use.

What Tithely Is, and What It Is Not

Tithely (often styled Tithe.ly) launched in 2014 and now serves tens of thousands of churches across the United States, Canada, Australia, and the United Kingdom. The core product is online giving: a branded giving page that runs on Tithely's payment infrastructure, plus a free donor app that lets members give to any church on the platform.

Around the giving product, Tithely has built a broader bundle. The paid Tithely Elevate tier adds church management software (people, attendance, groups, events), websites, messaging, and live streaming under one subscription. There is also Tithely Tap, the company's own NFC tag product, plus Tithely Sites, Tithely Media, and a growing list of add-ons.

What Tithely is not: it is not just an app. The mobile app is one delivery channel among several. It is also not a hardware company in the traditional sense. Tithely Tap is a software-tied NFC tag rather than a standalone platform-agnostic plate. That distinction matters when you compare Tithely Tap with Tap.Giving NFC tap plates, which open any giving page on any platform. For the deeper breakdown, see our Tithely Tap 3-year cost analysis.

How Members Give on Tithely

From the member's side, Tithely offers four main ways to give. The platform looks slightly different on each one, but the donation flows into the same dashboard on the church side.

The friction order matters. Of those four, tap to give and tap to donate produce the lowest friction during a service: about 8 seconds from intent to confirmation, no app to install, no number to text. NFC giving is about 42 times more engaging than QR codes for the same moment, and 53% of NFC givers are first-time givers. For a walkthrough of the full giver experience, see how tap to give works for churches.

How the Admin Side Works

The church administrator sees every donation inside the Tithely dashboard at my.tithe.ly. The interface is organized around a few core jobs.

• Donations: a chronological list of every gift, with filters for fund, donor, date range, and payment method. Export to CSV for the bookkeeper.
• Donors: a profile per giver with lifetime totals, recurring schedules, last gift date, and notes. Donors can be merged when one person gives under multiple email addresses.
• Recurring: active and paused recurring schedules with the ability to email donors whose card just expired before the gift fails.
• Funds: general, missions, building, benevolence, and any custom fund the church sets up. Funds appear on the giving page as selectable options.
• Payouts: a list of deposits to the bank account, with itemized reconciliation reports that match a bank statement. Card deposits land in 1 to 3 business days, ACH in 3 to 7.
• Contribution statements: automatic year-end tax statements emailed or downloadable as PDFs.

Add Tithely Elevate and the dashboard expands to include people management, attendance tracking, events, and messaging. That expanded suite is where Tithely's monthly subscription is paying for itself, not the giving function itself.

What Tithely Costs in 2026

Tithely runs a freemium model. Online donations work on the free tier with no monthly subscription. Software bundles trade a monthly fee for added features. The figures below pull from Tithely's public pricing page in 2026. Confirm with Tithely before signing, since plan names and exact rates have changed a few times.

Source: Tithely public pricing page, 2026. Confirm current rates with Tithely. For a longer fee walkthrough, see our Tithely pricing and fees breakdown, our Tithely vs Tap.Giving comparison, and our plate pricing page.

A practical read: the free tier is genuinely free in monthly terms, but the processing fee is paid on every gift. A church taking $150,000 a year in digital giving on cards pays roughly $4,400 a year in processing through Tithely (or any other Stripe-priced platform). ACH gifts cost meaningfully less. Pushing donors toward ACH is one of the biggest fee savings a treasurer can drive. For comparison context, our best online giving platforms guide lines up Tithely against the rest of the market.

Where NFC Tap Plates Fit on Top of Tithely

Tithely answers "how does the church accept donations." NFC tap plates answer "how does a member give during the offering without typing or scanning." The two are complementary. Plates do not replace Tithely. They sit on the back of every pew or chair and open the Tithely giving page in 8 seconds.

A 200-seat church running Tithely and 200 plates spends $800 once for hardware and keeps the same Tithely page, the same donor records, and the same deposit schedule. The plates are platform agnostic: if the church ever leaves Tithely for Pushpay, Subsplash, Donorbox, Givelify, Anedot, Planning Center Giving, or Nucleus Giving, we re-encode the plates with the new URL. No new hardware, no migration. That is the difference between contactless giving as a feature of one platform and contactless giving as a layer above the platform.

For the step-by-step on encoding plates with a Tithely URL, see our Tithely tap to give setup guide. For the broader pattern of using church NFC tags and tap technology for churches without locking into a platform, see our church NFC tags complete guide and contactless church collection plate guide.

When Tithely Is the Right Fit

Honest take: Tithely is a strong default choice for a lot of churches. Times we recommend it without reservation:

• You want a free giving page with no monthly minimum and a clear upgrade path into church management software later.
• Your members are app-comfortable and likely to use the Tithely Giving app for recurring gifts.
• You want a single vendor for giving, ChMS, sites, and messaging once you can afford the Elevate tier.
• You serve a U.S., Canadian, Australian, or U.K. church and want a giving platform with bank deposits in your local currency.

Times to look at Pushpay, Subsplash, Planning Center Giving, Vanco, or Donorbox instead: when your church size pushes past 1,000 weekly attendees and you want enterprise donor analytics, when your denomination has standardized on a different platform, or when you want media production and app branding baked into the same vendor. Lifeway Research publishes regular studies on church giving and tech adoption that are worth reading before any platform commitment.

Whichever platform you pick, the in-service tap to give experience is a hardware decision, not a platform decision. See how it works and the NFC FAQ for the mechanics, or jump straight to plate pricing.

FAQ: Common Tithely Questions