Givebear vs Snowball Fundraising. Kiosks, fees and funds, side by side.

Snowball Fundraising offers text-to-give keywords, and Givebear does not. If staff use that every week, leaving Snowball Fundraising means replacing it with another tool or going without.

Givebear fits organizations whose in-person giving needs more than a keyword on a slide: a walk-up kiosk in the lobby (a one-time purchase with no per-device subscription), plus online giving pages, events, receipts, and donor records in the same account, with prices published on the website.

Compared with Snowball Fundraising, Givebear's kiosk for a lobby or event entrance 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 pricing transparency before talking to sales, in-person and kiosk giving hardware, text-to-give and phone-based giving, event and auction tooling, and donor records across giving channels. Use your last year-end 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 Snowball Fundraising.

Snowball quotes pricing through sales, so confirm your renewal date and cancellation terms before planning a cutover. Export donor and gift history, list active recurring gifts, and remember that text-to-give keywords live on in donors' message threads: keep the old number active through a transition window or update every sign and slide that still shows it, then redirect public donation page URLs to their replacements.

Givebear imports contacts and past gifts from a CSV, so the Snowball Fundraising export is the first step. Create your funds in Givebear before importing the Snowball Fundraising file, since fund names in it do not create funds on their own. Saved cards move only if Snowball Fundraising 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 Snowball Fundraising: website buttons, email footers, printed QR codes, and event pages. Repoint the ones you control; a printed code that sends donors to Snowball Fundraising keeps working only as long as Snowball Fundraising keeps that page up.

Snowball sells no kiosk. Its own donation-kiosks page instead recommends pairing the platform with third-party hardware: DipJar countertop devices and Square point-of-sale gear. Half of that advice can no longer be followed, because DipJar ceased all operations at 8:00am ET on February 11, 2025, per its own shutdown notice, stranding 3,500+ organizations, and its dashboards went dark on February 27. The other half routes a nonprofit into a restaurant product: Square's $149 Kiosk mount is a self-ordering fixture that does not include the iPad and requires a Plus or Premium plan at roughly $50/mo more per device, per squareup.com, verified June 2026. In-person cards on Square run 2.6% + $0.15 with no nonprofit discount, and the fixed fee rose from $0.10 to $0.15 in February 2025.

Price the DIY route before committing to it. The Square path means the $149 mount, an iPad bought separately, and roughly $50/mo per device in plan fees (roughly $600 a year before the tablet), and those gifts settle in Square's dashboard rather than in the fundraising platform's donor records, so lobby givers never connect to the text-to-give and online history Snowball holds. Givebear's kiosk was designed as a donation fixture from the start: a wall mount or floor stand at $999 to $1,099 one-time with no per-device subscription, running Stripe Terminal for tap to donate, with every gift landing in the same donor records as the online giving page. The plan behind it 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.

Text-to-give earns its keep when donors are already seated and listening: the emcee reads a keyword, two hundred phones come out, and pledges land while the energy in the room is high. That is Snowball's home turf and a real strength. The walk-up moment is different. A visitor standing in a lobby has to read the keyword off a sign, send the text, wait for the reply link, open the browser, and type a card number: five steps, standing up, with a line possibly forming behind them. A tap-to-donate kiosk compresses that to picking an amount and tapping a card or phone, which is why an after-service or post-event crowd moves through a kiosk a few seconds per donor while a texted link depends on each person finishing checkout on their own screen, or remembering to later.

The budgeting conversation also runs differently. Snowball publishes no prices, so a treasurer cannot put it in a comparison spreadsheet without booking a sales call; the only public reference point is Software Advice's listing at about $549 per year, a third-party figure rather than Snowball's own published price, per softwareadvice.com, verified June 2026. Givebear's numbers are public: the kiosk is $999 to $1,099 one-time with no per-device monthly fee, and the plan 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. The board approves a hardware receipt once instead of renewing a quoted software line every year.