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

Vanco fits churches that want a long-established eGiving vendor with a $0/mo entry plan (GROW, which rises to $10/mo if onboarding milestones go unmet, per vancopayments.com/egiving/pricing, verified June 2026) and whose giving skews toward larger monthly or annual gifts, where the $0.45 per-transaction fee fades to a rounding error.

Givebear fits churches that want an unattended tap-to-donate kiosk in the lobby instead of a staffed swipe reader: the hardware is a one-time purchase with no per-device fee, donors can choose to cover processing costs, and online, kiosk, and event gifts land in the same donor records.

Compared with Vanco, Givebear's kiosk for the church foyer 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 effective cost on small weekly gifts, monthly software fees and plan tiers, kiosk and in-person giving hardware, recurring giving and donor records, and receipts and year-end statements. Use last Easter or an ordinary Sunday 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 Vanco.

Export donor records and gift history, list active recurring gifts with their card or bank schedules and billing dates, map fund names (general, missions, building) to the new structure, confirm how long reporting access lasts after cancellation, and time the cutover between Sundays so weekly givers never hit a dead giving link.

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

Vanco's GROW plan charges 2.90% + $0.45 on card gifts, per vancopayments.com/egiving/pricing, verified June 2026. The percentage looks ordinary; the flat $0.45 is where small-gift congregations bleed. A $20 card gift pays $0.58 in percentage fees plus the $0.45 fixed fee: $1.03 total, a 5.15% effective rate. A member who gives that $20 every Sunday hands over $53.56 in fees on $1,040 of annual giving, while the same $1,040 given once a year would cost $30.61, a rate just under 3%. The gift pattern most churches depend on, small and weekly, is exactly the pattern this fee structure punishes. Amex cards run 3.99% on either plan, and each chargeback costs $25.

THRIVE, at $54/mo, drops the card rate to 2.65% + $0.39, which brings the same $20 gift to $0.92 in fees (4.6% effective). The per-gift saving over GROW is 11 cents, so the subscription pays for itself only after roughly 491 twenty-dollar gifts in a month: about $9,820 in weekly-sized card giving before THRIVE beats the entry plan. And GROW's $0/mo price carries its own catch, rising to $10/mo if onboarding milestones go unmet. Givebear publishes its model for the same comparison: 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, and the kiosk is a one-time purchase at $999 to $1,099 with no per-device subscription. Run your church's real gift sizes through both models before choosing.

Churches researching a Vanco giving kiosk usually find references to the legacy GivePlus Kiosk. That product no longer appears anywhere on Vanco's site: the current church-kiosk page sells a mobile card swipe reader with no published price (vancopayments.com, verified June 2026). A swipe reader is attended hardware. It needs a phone or tablet to run on, a table to sit at, and a volunteer to handle each transaction, which makes it a checkout line rather than a fixture a member can walk up to between services.

An unattended kiosk solves a different problem. Givebear's kiosk comes as a wall mount or floor stand, runs Stripe Terminal for tap to donate, and stands in the lobby with no volunteer behind it. Hardware is $999 to $1,099 one-time with no per-device monthly fee, every tap writes to the same donor records as the church's online giving page, and year-end statements cover both channels. For a congregation whose biggest in-person giving moment is the ten minutes after the service ends, the difference between attended swipe hardware and an unattended tap kiosk is the difference between a queue at a table and members tapping as they pass.