Tithe.ly Review

Tithe.ly (now styled Tithely) is a US church giving and church software company run from Nashville, Tennessee. Its giving product is free to set up, with no monthly fee or contract. As of September 2026 you pay 2.9% + $0.30 on each card gift, 3.5% + $0.30 on American Express and 1% + $0.30 on ACH bank gifts. Donors can choose to add the fee to their gift. Payments run on Stripe: each church signs Stripe's connected-account agreement and gets a sub-merchant account under Tithe.ly's platform, so approval is quick but the account relationship sits with Stripe and Tithe.ly. Deposits go out weekly on Wednesdays by default, card gifts become available after two business days, and ACH gifts can take up to ten. Tithe.ly also sells church management, apps, websites, messaging and worship planning. It lists these at $19 to $89 a month each, or $119 a month for everything in its All Access bundle. The company grew through mergers: it combined with Australian church-software firm Elvanto in 2018, bought Breeze ChMS in 2021, and has had private equity investment from Accel-KKR since 2022. Reviews on Capterra and Trustpilot are strongly positive. However, the BBB rates it F, largely for leaving complaints unanswered, and recent complaints focus on subscription billing after cancellation.

Estimated annual cost at three realistic processing volumes, using Tithe.ly’s published online rate plus monthly fees. Real costs vary with average transaction size, chargeback rate, and any negotiated terms.

What Tithe.ly is

Tithe.ly is a US giving platform for churches and ministries that has grown into a full suite of church software. According to the company, the idea came to Dean Sweetman, then a pastor in Atlanta, in 2012. His son Barnabas (Barn) built the first version of the giving app, which Dean launched at his own church, and the company says it took off in 2014, when the Sweetmans were joined by Frank Barry and Steve Klein. An archived copy of tithe.ly from April 2014 announces that 'Simple Tithe is becoming tithe.ly'. Sources disagree on a founding year: business directories give 2013, while Accel-KKR's portfolio page and Tithe.ly's own 2021 Breeze announcement say the original app was built in 2015. We do not state one.

Tithe.ly grew by merger. In November 2018 it combined with Elvanto, an Australian church management company founded by Ben Sinclair, and the joint business traded as Tithe.ly with about 8,500 churches in 45 countries. In 2021 it bought Breeze ChMS, which then served more than 9,000 churches, and Breeze has since been merged into Tithely Church Management. Accel-KKR, the Menlo Park private equity firm, lists a 2022 equity investment in Tithe.ly and four of its people on the board, but has not published the size of its stake, so we describe it as an investor rather than an owner. Dean Sweetman and Frank Barry are co-CEOs. Tithe.ly's contracting entity is Your Giving Group, at 901 Woodland Street in Nashville. The company describes its team of nearly 200 as fully remote and says it serves more than 53,000 churches.

Why we list Tithe.ly as a payment facilitator

Tithe.ly does not hold its own acquiring relationship. Its Terms of Service say payment processing is currently provided by Stripe, and each church accepts Stripe's Connected Account Agreement and a sub-merchant agreement when it turns on giving. The church signs up in minutes under Tithe.ly's platform, at a price Tithe.ly sets and publishes, and Tithe.ly controls the deposit schedule and can hold funds. That is how the payment facilitator model works in practice, even though Stripe is the registered facilitator and settles the money. It is not an ISO, and it is not a merchant of record: donations are made to the church, not to Tithe.ly.

What it costs

• Credit and debit cards (Visa, Mastercard, Discover): 2.9% + $0.30 per gift, as of September 2026.
• American Express: 3.5% + $0.30 per gift.
• ACH bank transfer: 1% + $0.30 per gift.
• No monthly fee, setup fee, contract, PCI fee or deposit fee for giving, according to the pricing page. The pricing page also says there is no extra charge for refunds or disputes, although the terms mention unspecified 'pass-through fees' on disputed payments.
• Cover the Fees: donors can choose to add the fee to their gift. Tithe.ly says about 60% of donors do. We have not seen independent evidence for that figure.

As an illustration, take a church receiving $20,000 a month: $12,000 in 120 card gifts and $8,000 in 80 ACH gifts, with no donors covering fees. Card fees would be $348 + $36 = $384, and ACH fees $80 + $24 = $104, for a total of $488, about 2.4% of giving. If six in ten card donors covered the fee, the church's own cost would drop to about $258. The $0.30 fixed fee matters most on small gifts. A $10 ACH gift costs $0.40, or 4%, and a $10 card gift costs $0.59, nearly 6%. Churches with large, regular gifts should push donors toward ACH.

The pricing page, as of September 2026, lists church management at $72 a month, the custom church app at $89 and a website at $19. The help centre lists messaging at $19 a month. All Access bundles everything, including worship planning, daily deposits, data migration and one-to-one onboarding, for a flat $119 a month however large the church, and Tithe.ly values the bundle at $228 a month. The pricing page says annual billing saves about 25% on its church management plans but does not show the annual price, so ask for it in writing. Every paid plan starts with a 30-day free trial, after which the card you signed up with is charged automatically.

Deposits, holds and contract terms

Deposits go out weekly, on Wednesdays, by default. Card gifts are available after two business days and ACH gifts after up to ten. A new church's first gift takes ten business days to arrive, as a one-time security check, and deposits stop if Tithe.ly asks for verification documents and does not get them. Daily and monthly schedules exist; daily deposits need Tithe.ly's approval, and the help centre recommends weekly. The terms let Tithe.ly hold funds pending verification and suspend or delay payouts to guard against chargebacks or fraud. A disputed gift is deducted from deposits until the dispute is settled, and Tithe.ly can debit the church's bank account or invoice it to recover a negative balance, including after the account is closed. Giving itself carries no contract. Subscriptions renew automatically each month or year. Under the Terms of Service (updated 21 September 2026), you may end the service on 30 days' written notice, but you stay liable for fees through the end of the current term, and paid fees are not refunded, so an annual plan is a year's commitment in practice. Prices can change when Tithe.ly updates its website, the terms apply California law with arbitration in San Francisco, and Tithe.ly's liability is capped at three months of fees.

Reputation

As of 30 September 2026, Tithe.ly has 4.7 out of 5 from 693 reviews on Capterra, and 4.1 from 1,170 reviews on Trustpilot, where 78% of reviews are five-star. Only 43 of those Trustpilot reviews were posted in the past year, and Tithe.ly invites customers to leave reviews there. Reviewers consistently praise ease of use, the all-in-one set-up and support staff. The BBB tells a different story. Tithe.ly is not accredited and is rated F, which the BBB attributes to three complaints in three years, two of them unanswered. The complaints describe being invoiced after a confirmed cancellation, recurring donations that a donor could not stop, and an unexplained card-updater email. Recent one-star Trustpilot reviews repeat the billing theme and complain about slow giving pages. Our searches found no lawsuit or regulatory action naming Tithe.ly.

Who should use Tithe.ly

Tithe.ly suits a small or mid-size US church that wants every common way of giving working quickly, at a published price with no monthly fee, and especially one that would also use its church management, app or website tools. A church processing large volumes should compare negotiated card rates elsewhere, because Tithe.ly publishes no volume discount on its list rate. A church that depends on quick access to Sunday's gifts should budget for the weekly default, the ten-day first deposit and ACH clearing times. Before starting a paid plan, choose monthly billing unless you are sure you will stay a year, and keep written confirmation of any cancellation.