Givebear vs iChessed. Kiosks, fees and funds, side by side.

iChessed fits congregations that want a synagogue-first vendor and a low entry price: its cheapest device is $129 one-time with software from $30/mo (per ichessed.com, verified June 2026), which suits a small shul testing whether a lobby kiosk gets used before committing real budget. Leadership should be comfortable asking sales for the per-gift transaction rate in writing, since it is not published anywhere on the site.

Givebear fits boards that want every cost known before purchase and no subscription after it: the kiosk is a one-time purchase with no per-device fee, your team sets preset buttons to chai increments ($18, $36, $180), funds carry the community's own names (tzedakah, yahrzeit fund, building fund), and kiosk taps land in the same donor records as online giving for year-end statements.

Compared with iChessed, Givebear's kiosk for the synagogue lobby is a 21.5-inch touchscreen with a built-in Stripe card reader, sold once at $999 to $1,099 (wall mount or battery floor stand) with no per-kiosk software subscription.

Score both platforms on per-donation fees published before purchase, monthly software cost over the life of the device, one-time hardware cost, chai-increment presets and fund naming, and online giving and donor records beyond the kiosk. Use last High Holy Days appeal as the test case: set up the same funds and receipt wording in a free Givebear account and check whether it produces the report your board asked for from iChessed.

Export donation history and donor contact details from the iChessed dashboard before canceling, confirm the subscription end date so the device does not go dark mid-appeal, time the cancellation for after the final gifts settle, repoint lobby signage and QR codes at the new giving page, and recreate your chai presets and fund list on the new kiosk before the next weekday minyan.

Givebear imports contacts and past gifts from a CSV, so the iChessed export is the first step. Create your funds in Givebear before importing the iChessed file, since fund names in it do not create funds on their own. Saved cards move only if iChessed and Stripe support a transfer; otherwise recurring donors restart their gift on your new page, so announce the change a few weeks ahead.

Before cutover, list every place a donor can reach iChessed: website buttons, email footers, printed QR codes, and event pages. Repoint the ones you control; a printed code that sends donors to iChessed keeps working only as long as iChessed keeps that page up.

iChessed is unusually open about one-time costs for a synagogue vendor: devices run $129 to $690 and the software subscription runs $30 to $59.99/mo, per ichessed.com, verified June 2026. The number it never publishes is the transaction fee on each donation. For a treasurer, that is the figure that scales: the subscription is a fixed, knowable line item, but an unpublished percentage of a full High Holiday appeal season is not. Before signing, get the per-gift rate (card processing included) in writing from sales, then work out what a typical $36 gift actually nets.

The subscription alone runs $360 to about $720 a year per device, or $1,080 to roughly $2,160 over three years, before any per-gift fee (per ichessed.com, verified June 2026). Givebear publishes the whole stack: the kiosk is $999 to $1,099 one-time with no per-device subscription, and the platform side is a flat platform fee from 1.9% to 5.9% depending on plan (one rate online, at kiosks, and on memberships), plus Stripe card processing at cost, with no setup fee and no monthly minimum.

Jewish giving moves in multiples of chai, and a kiosk whose preset buttons read $18, $36, and $180 meets members where they already give. Givebear presets are set by your team from the dashboard, so the lobby device shows the increments your congregation actually uses, and they can change for a capital campaign or a Purim appeal without touching the hardware. Fund names work the same way: tzedakah, yahrzeit fund, building fund, security fund, or kiddush sponsorship appear as the donor-facing choices, in your own wording.

Synagogue kiosk traffic has its own rhythm: the device earns its keep at weekday minyan, Hebrew school drop-off, and office-hours visits rather than on Shabbat, when members are not tapping cards. Each weekday tap writes to the same donor record as the member's online gifts, so the parent who taps $36 at Sunday drop-off and later sets up $18/mo online shows up as one person at year-end statement time, with receipts sent automatically. And because the hardware is a one-time purchase, a one-kiosk shul is not budgeting a recurring software line for every year the device hangs on the wall.