Subsplash Tap Cost for a 500-Member Church (2026 Teardown)

What Subsplash Tap and Subsplash Giving Actually Bundle

Subsplash sells two related things to a 500-member church considering tap to give: the Subsplash Giving subscription (the platform that processes the donation) and Subsplash Tap, a branded NFC disc that opens a Subsplash giving page. The disc is the hardware. The subscription is everything else, donor records, recurring schedules, the app, ChMS, sermon hosting, and so on.

Subsplash does not publish a public price for either piece in 2026. From church-leader conversations and quoted ranges in the past year, a 500-member church on Subsplash typically lands between $99 and $149 per month for the giving tier on its own, more when the app, ChMS, or media bundles are attached. The discs are sold in batches and quoted alongside the subscription. The discs only matter if a church is already paying the Subsplash subscription; they are not sold as standalone NFC tap plates the way Tap.Giving sells ours.

Tap.Giving sits in a different category. We are hardware only. Our plates ship encoded with whatever giving URL the church gives us. A 500-member church can keep its current giving stack, Subsplash Giving, Tithely, Pushpay, Donorbox, Givelify, Anedot, Planning Center Giving, or Nucleus Giving, and add plates on top. The plate is essentially a sign-post pointing at a URL the church already owns. That distinction is the entire pricing story.

For more on the broader Subsplash pricing model across bundles, see our 2026 Subsplash pricing breakdown and our feature-by-feature Subsplash Tap comparison.

What 500 Members Translates to in Plate Count

A 500-member church is not the same as a 500-seat sanctuary. Membership counts include children, college students who attend twice a year, and members who attend remotely. The number that matters for tap-to-give hardware is average weekly attendance, which for a 500-member Protestant congregation usually lands in the 280 to 360 range. Plan one plate per seat your church regularly uses.

For the rest of this teardown we will use 300 plates as the working number, which is the most common order shape for a 500-member church running one Sunday service. A second service or a chair-flex room nudges that toward 400, which is also where Tap.Giving's $3.50 tier kicks in. Full pricing is on the Tap.Giving pricing page.

The 5-Year Cost Table, Side by Side

We compare two realistic paths for the same 500-member church: keep Subsplash Giving and buy Subsplash Tap discs, or keep Subsplash Giving and buy Tap.Giving plates for the in-service hardware. Both columns assume the church does not drop Subsplash, so the subscription is constant. The variable is the hardware layer.

The headline savings are larger if the church re-evaluates Subsplash itself. A 500-member church that drops Subsplash entirely and routes contactless giving through a lighter platform (or Subsplash's free-tier giving alternative, depending on what they need) saves the entire $7,740 in subscription cost too. That decision is outside the scope of this post; for that comparison, see Subsplash Tap vs Tap.Giving (feature view) and the 2026 best online giving platforms guide.

Subscription-only savings aside, the hardware swap alone is roughly $1,020 lower over five years, with no per-month commitment and no quote process. That is the cheapest path for a 500-member church that wants to tap to donate on Sunday without changing platforms.

Where the Monthly Cost Goes Each Month

The Subsplash Giving line item is the part that does not disappear when you order Subsplash Tap discs. Whether or not the church owns NFC hardware, the subscription bills the same way. For board members reviewing the budget, that monthly draw is the long-term cost driver, not the hardware.

On the processing side, Subsplash Giving's card processing typically runs 2.9% + $0.30 per transaction, with ACH a flat 1% (capped). That fee is the same whether the gift comes from a Subsplash app, a Subsplash web page, a Subsplash Tap disc, or a Tap.Giving plate that opens the same Subsplash URL. Adding plates does not change a single line of the church's existing platform bill.

For context against the broader category: Pushpay typically runs around $1,475 per month for a similar-sized church, Tithely's Pro plan is around $119 per month (with a free tier available), and Donorbox sits at $0 to $150 per month depending on volume. Tap.Giving is $0 per month, ever. We sell NFC tap plates and a one-time invoice and that is the entire ongoing relationship.

If your current bill is mostly platform subscription with a thin hardware layer on top, swapping the hardware layer is the lowest-risk lever you can pull. For more, see our Tithely 2026 pricing teardown, our Pushpay vs Tap.Giving math, or the church donation technology comparison.

What You Keep When You Swap the Hardware

A common worry from executive pastors is that switching the NFC layer breaks something inside Subsplash. It does not. The plate is just a URL. When Tap.Giving prints 300 plates encoded with yourchurch.churchcenter.com/giving or subsplash.com/yourchurch/give, every gift still flows through Subsplash. Donor records, recurring schedules, ACH setups, tax receipts, and the app all stay untouched. The only thing that changes is the disc on the pew back.

Worth flagging for the worship-tech director on the call: NFC giving on a Tap.Giving plate uses the same NTAG chip standard as every other church NFC product on the market. Compatibility with iPhone XS and newer, every modern Android, and the Subsplash giving page is identical. How tap to give works walks through the chip and the eight-second giver experience for anyone newer to the technology.

When a 500-Member Church Should Pick Subsplash Tap Anyway

A few honest carve-outs. Subsplash Tap is a sensible fit if the church wants every piece of its giving experience to be sourced from a single vendor and is willing to pay a premium for that single point of contact. If the executive pastor is also handling the website, app, and ChMS through Subsplash, consolidating to one quarterly invoice has real operational value, even if the unit cost is higher.

Subsplash also has features Tap.Giving deliberately does not build, like an integrated digital giving for churches app, ChMS, sermon hosting, and an event-registration system. None of that disappears in a Tap.Giving order, because we are the hardware layer only. But if the church wants every adjacent service from the same vendor for governance reasons, that is a legitimate reason to stay on Subsplash Tap.

For most 500-member churches, the math still favors a one-time plate purchase. The savings show up in year one and compound every year after. Tap.Giving complements the platforms churches already use, including tap technology for churches like Subsplash Tap, by being the cheapest path to a printed, branded, in-service contactless church collection plate.

FAQ: Subsplash Tap for a 500-Member Church