Migrating church giving platforms carries a cost most evaluations leave out: every existing recurring giver has to re-enter their payment details on the new system, and a share of them never do. Before switching, it’s worth separating the complaints a migration actually resolves (cost, contract terms, usability) from the ones it doesn’t (recurring churn, giving that doesn’t grow with income), because the second group is a property of card-based fixed-amount giving and follows you to the new platform.
Churches don’t go looking for a new giving platform because they’re curious. They go looking because something specific has become annoying enough to justify a project nobody wants to run.
Usually it’s one of three things: the total cost crept up and someone finally added it all together, the contract renewal arrived with terms that felt non-negotiable, or the giving numbers are flat and the platform is the most visible thing to blame.
The first two are real reasons to shop. The third is where most churches lose a year. Flat giving is usually a mechanism problem that every platform in the category shares, so you can complete a migration successfully and end up with exactly the same numbers on a different login screen.
Here’s how to tell which situation you’re in before you commit to the project.
A disclosure, since you searched for an alternative and landed on a vendor. Roster is not a Pushpay replacement and can’t be one. We don’t process one-time gifts and we’re not a platform. What we are is one option you add to the page you already run, which is why we have an opinion about migrations that aren’t worth running. Weigh the rest accordingly.
The Cost Nobody Prices Into the Migration
Ask any church administrator who has moved giving platforms and they’ll tell you the same thing: the software migration was fine, and the donor migration was the problem.
The reason is mechanical. Transfer support varies by vendor, but payment credentials usually don’t move, so every one of your recurring givers has to be individually asked to go re-establish a gift they already set up and haven’t thought about in two years. These are the most committed people in your congregation, the base your budget is built on.
Some will do it the day you ask. Some will do it after the third reminder. And some will not do it at all. Not a decision to stop giving, just that re-entering a card number is a small task with no deadline, and small tasks with no deadlines lose to everything else.
You can estimate your own exposure in about two minutes. Take your recurring giver count, multiply by your average recurring gift, and multiply by twelve. Now ask what percentage of that base you’d need to lose permanently for the migration to cost more than it saves. For most churches the answer is a surprisingly small number, often single digits.
None of which argues against ever migrating. It argues for knowing the number before the board votes, and for making sure the problem you’re solving is worth it.
Four Lines to Check in Your Own Contract
Before comparing vendors, get precise about what you’re actually paying. The category prices in layers, and the layers are usually on different pages.
The processing rate, and whether it’s flat. Card processing in church giving generally lands somewhere in the 2.2–3.5% range plus a per-transaction fee. Tiered rates that vary by card type make your effective rate impossible to predict, so find the actual blended number from last year’s statements rather than the advertised one.
The per-transaction fee. Around $0.30 is typical, and it’s the line that quietly punishes small gifts. On a $10 gift it’s a 3% surcharge on top of the percentage. If your congregation gives frequently in small amounts, this line may be larger than you think.
The platform or subscription fee. Separate from processing, often billed monthly or annually, and often bundled with modules you may or may not use.
The term and the exit. Auto-renewal date, notice window, and whether there’s an early termination clause. This is the line that determines whether you have a decision to make or a date to wait for.
Add those four together and divide by last year’s giving volume. That’s your real all-in rate, and it’s the only number that makes a vendor comparison meaningful.
Which Complaints a Migration Actually Fixes
Be fair to the exercise: some of them, genuinely.
Cost, if your all-in rate is high. A few points of processing on real volume is a staff position. Worth moving for.
Contract terms. If you’re locked into a multi-year agreement with a platform you’ve outgrown, the term itself is a good enough reason.
Usability and support. If your staff spends hours each month fighting the admin tools, or a support ticket takes a week, that’s a legitimate operational cost even though it doesn’t appear on an invoice.
Bundling you don’t want. Paying for a church app, a website builder, and a ChMS because they came attached to the giving tool is a common and reasonable reason to unbundle.
If your complaint is on this list, shop the category properly. Get all-in rates in writing from two or three vendors, and ask each of them directly how existing recurring gifts transfer.
Which Ones It Doesn’t
Now the other list, and this is the part that changes the decision.
Recurring donor churn. Industry data puts annual attrition on card-based recurring giving at 15–20%, and a base leaking at that rate is behaving exactly as a long-term commitment does when it runs on cards that expire, get replaced after fraud alerts, and break when members switch banks. Your platform isn’t underperforming. Every card-based platform inherits this, because it’s a property of the payment rail rather than the software, so migrating gives you the same leak with a new dashboard. We laid out the mechanics in why churches lose 15–20% of recurring donors every year.
Giving that doesn’t grow. If your giving is flat while your congregation’s income isn’t, the cause is likely that every giving option you offer asks for a dollar amount. A number set four years ago doesn’t index to anything. No platform in the category will fix that, because they all ask the same question. That’s the giving gap, and it’s typically worth $30,000–$50,000 a year in a mid-size church.
Members forgetting to give. Giving that depends on someone being present, or on someone being prompted, declines whenever attendance or prompting declines. That’s the mechanism behind the dip your church sees every summer and the spike it sees every December. A different platform doesn’t change what the giving is coupled to.
The test is simple. Ask: if we woke up tomorrow on the best platform in the category, would this specific problem be gone? For everything in this second list, the answer is no.
The Third Option Most Evaluations Skip
There’s a move between “stay and accept it” and “migrate and hope.”
You can keep Pushpay, Tithe.ly, Planning Center, or whatever you’re running, and add a giving channel it doesn’t offer. An additional option on the same giving page, for the members whose commitment is proportional and long-term.
That’s what Roster is. Members click a button on your existing giving page, choose a percentage rather than a dollar amount, and it comes from each paycheck. There’s no card in the path to expire, and the amount moves with their income. Your current platform keeps handling one-time gifts, card recurring, ACH, events, and everything else it does well.
What makes this worth weighing before a migration is arithmetic. It doesn’t ask a single existing recurring giver to re-enter anything. Your base is untouched. Nobody has to be reminded three times to re-establish a gift. The setup is a snippet on the giving page, and if nobody uses it, it cost you nothing, because we charge 2% flat on giving volume with no monthly fee and no setup fee.
When You Should Actually Migrate
Three cases where we’d tell you to switch platforms and not think about us at all:
Your all-in rate is genuinely out of line. Run the four-line calculation. If you’re materially above the market, that’s found money and you should go get it.
Your staff is losing real hours to bad software. Time is the most expensive thing a small church team has.
You need something structural your platform can’t do. A real ChMS, proper event registration, multi-site accounting. If the giving tool is the tail on that dog, choose for the dog.
What all three have in common: the problem is with the platform. If the problem is with the payment method, changing platforms is the expensive way to keep it.
What Roster Is and Isn’t
It isn’t a giving platform replacement. No church app, no website builder, no ChMS, no event registration, no one-time gift processing.
It is one giving option your page doesn’t currently have: give a percentage of your paycheck. It runs alongside what you already use, and the two solve different problems. We compare them directly in paycheck giving vs. recurring card.
If you’re mid-evaluation and still shopping the category, the order of questions matters more than the feature grid, and we laid that order out in how to choose a church giving platform.
For this decision specifically: run the four-line cost check, price your donor re-entry exposure, then decide whether your actual complaint lives in the platform or in the payment method. Those two answers will make the decision for you.
Roster adds paycheck giving to your existing giving page, alongside Pushpay, Tithe.ly, and Planning Center. Members set a percentage once, it comes from each paycheck, and no existing giver has to re-enter anything. 2% flat on giving volume, no monthly fee, no setup fee, cancel anytime.
→ Join the waitlist to add the channel instead of running the migration.