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

Square offers attended retail and merch sales, and Givebear does not. If staff use that every week, leaving Square means replacing it with another tool or going without.

Givebear fits unattended giving: a lobby kiosk where a donor picks a fund and an amount, taps a card or phone, and gets a donation receipt and a donor record automatically, with monthly giving and fund reporting included instead of rebuilt from a retail catalog.

Compared with Square, 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 donation-first checkout versus retail catalog workaround, recurring giving at the kiosk, donation tax receipts versus sales receipts, hardware plus monthly software cost per device, and donor records versus customer directory. 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 Square.

If donations currently flow through Square as catalog items, export the full transaction history first, map item names to funds, and flag which buyers are actually donors who need year-end acknowledgments: Square stores them as customers on sales receipts, not as donors with giving history. Keep Square for genuine retail sales; only the giving flow needs to move.

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

Square Kiosk is a $149 iPad mount sold for restaurant self-ordering, and the iPad is not included (per squareup.com's Square Kiosk hardware page, verified June 2026). It also will not run on Square's free plan: it requires a Plus or Premium subscription, roughly $50/mo more per device. That turns the $149 sticker into roughly $750 in year one before the cost of the iPad itself, and roughly $1,950 over three years for a single device.

Processing adds up on top: in-person cards run 2.6% + $0.15 with no nonprofit discount (per squareup.com's processing fees page, verified June 2026), and the fixed fee rose from $0.10 to $0.15 in February 2025, a 50% jump on the flat component. Small gifts feel it most: a $10 tap costs $0.41 to process, an effective 4.1%, and a $20 tap costs $0.67, about 3.4%. Givebear kiosks are a one-time purchase at $999 to $1,099 with no per-device software charge, and the plan itself 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.

Square Kiosk's software is a self-ordering flow: a menu grid, item modifiers, a cart, an order total. To collect donations on it, a nonprofit has to disguise gifts as products (a "$25 donation" catalog item, funds as item categories), and supporters come out the other side as customers attached to sales receipts. There is no fund-designation step, no donor-facing recurring option at the kiosk, and no donation acknowledgment a supporter can file at tax time without staff reworking receipts by hand.

To be fair to Square, it does the job it was designed for well. A merch table at the annual gala, the bake-sale till, or a bookstore counter are all attended sales, and a volunteer on Square will clear those lines quickly. The split that works in practice is keeping retail on the POS and putting giving on hardware designed for it: Givebear kiosks run a donation-first flow on Stripe Terminal where the donor picks a fund, picks an amount, taps, and the receipt and donor record happen on their own.