Text to give is an SMS front door. A donor texts a keyword to a number, a reply comes back, and the gift finishes somewhere else: on a web form run by a payment processor. That detail changes what a church is shopping for, and it changes the bill.
Zaap holds a church’s giving link. The gift is processed by Subsplash, Church Center, Tithe.ly or whichever provider the church already uses. Keep that split in view while you price this, because most of what a text giving vendor sells is the front door, not the transaction.
What a giving text actually does
Almost every adult in the country can receive one. Pew Research Center found in 2025 that 98% of US adults own a cellphone of some kind, and that reach is the whole argument for texting.
The setup behind it takes one of three shapes:
- A shared short code, five or six digits, where your church’s keyword picks the account to credit
- A ten-digit number leased to your church alone, where the number itself is the identifier
- A plain auto-reply that sends back a link to your giving page, with no amount parsing at all
The first two feel like magic in the room. Someone texts a word and an amount, and a confirmation lands in seconds. What happens in between is a web form. The first time a donor texts, the platform replies with a link, they enter a card or a bank account on a hosted page, and only then does the amount in their message become a payment. After that the payment method is on file and the text really is the whole transaction.
So here is the honest version: most text giving, most of the time, ends in a web form anyway. What separates platforms is how often a donor has to see that form again.
What it costs to run
Interchange averaged 51 cents per exempt debit transaction in 2024, according to the Federal Reserve. The average transaction behind that figure was worth $42.27.
That is only the slice the card issuer keeps, before the network’s fee and before your processor’s margin. Digital giving budgets get eaten on this line rather than on the subscription, and the rate is set by your processor, not by the texting layer bolted onto it.
The texting bill is the second one: a monthly fee, sometimes a percentage of each gift, sometimes a per-message charge once volume passes a threshold. Published ranges move and vendors repackage, so ask for the rate card in writing, and ask one specific question. Does the quoted percentage sit on top of card processing, or include it? Usually it sits on top.
| Line item | Who bills it | Typical shape |
|---|---|---|
| Card or bank processing | Your payment processor | A percentage of each gift plus a flat per-transaction fee |
| Texting number and keyword | The text giving vendor | A monthly subscription, often with a per-gift or per-message add-on |
| Donor records and receipting | Bundled with one of the above | Included, or a tier upgrade |
| The page the giving link sits on | Your page host | Zaap’s Basic plan is free; Pro is $9 a month and Ultra $19 on monthly billing |
Only the last row carries a published number, which is rather the point: the first three are quoted church by church. Annual billing takes 15% off the paid tiers. That prices Pro at $7.40 a month, and the rest of the figures sit on Zaap pricing.
When texting is the right tool
Texting reaches the part of a congregation that will never install one of the giving apps for churches. Pew Research Center put smartphone ownership among adults 65 and older at 78% in 2025, and a text message reaches the rest of them anyway.
The in-service moment is where the fee earns itself back. A number on the screen during the offering, read out once, collects from people already holding a phone. A one-off appeal works the same way: a building fund, a missions trip, a storm relief offering. The keyword is the campaign, and it retires when the campaign ends.
It also earns a first-time gift. A visitor who would not fill out a connect card will sometimes text a word, and that word arrives with a phone number attached.
Recurring giving is the job texting does worst. Online tithing is a page habit rather than a message habit: people who give on a schedule set it once and leave it, and they set it on a form, not in a thread. Zaap’s view is that the page is where the durable money lives, and the text is what gets someone to the page the first time.
Where text to give falls down
The costs that surprise churches are not on the rate card:
- Provisioning, since the number and the keyword are registered with carriers before a single message can send
- Consent and opt-out handling, which is a compliance obligation for you and an inbox rule for your members
- A keyword that means nothing outside the room where it was announced
- A second donor record, sitting beside the one your church management software already keeps
The third one costs the most. A keyword only works where someone says it out loud. Nobody searches for it, nobody links to it, and it appears nowhere on your Instagram profile, under a sermon on YouTube, or on the flyer for next month’s missions night. Outside the service, the thing people can use is a link.
Look at what a working church page carries. Five14 Church in New Albany, Ohio runs its links from zaap.bio/five14church, and generosity is one tile among many: event registrations on Church Community Builder, a prayer request form, a volunteer form, small groups, a kids’ curriculum breakdown, sermon playlists and two podcasts. The Generosity tile points out to the church’s Subsplash giving page. A texting platform covers exactly one of those tiles.
Zaap’s position is plain. Do not lease a keyword until the giving link already has a home, because the keyword sends people to that link anyway, and a church that builds the page first can add texting later without redoing any of it.
One page that holds the giving link
A Zaap page sits at a URL in the format zaap.bio/username, and a church can customize the handle. On the free Basic plan that is the whole setup: no keyword to register, no carrier approval, nothing to cancel when a campaign ends.
What belongs on it, in the order people ask for it:
- Service times and the address
- The next event, with its registration link
- The connect card, pointed at the form your church already runs
- The giving link, pointed at your processor
- The latest sermon
A Zaap page carries link folders, embedded video and a custom domain on the Ultra plan, and the sermon tile can sync itself from YouTube so nobody updates it by hand. Turning Sunday’s message into something worth posting there is its own workflow. The platform’s five core areas run from link-in-bio and social sync through selling, collecting emails and SMS, and email marketing, so the same page can also carry a short post about where the building fund stands.
The giving link points out, and that is deliberate. Zaap displays the tile and counts the clicks on it. The money moves through your processor, on your processor’s own church donation page, into your church’s account, exactly as it does today. Nothing about a church’s giving arrangement changes when the link gains a home. The build itself is covered on Zaap’s link-in-bio tool.
Receipts, records and the IRS line
Whichever route collects the gift, the paperwork lands on the church. Three IRS substantiation rules do most of the work:
- A single gift of $250 or more needs a contemporaneous written acknowledgment from the church, which the donor must hold no later than the day they file that year’s return
- A quid pro quo contribution over $75, where the donor received something back, needs a written disclosure naming a good faith estimate of what they received
- A monetary gift of any amount needs a bank record or a written communication from the church, since a donor’s own note no longer counts
Text giving platforms usually send the instant confirmation and the year-end statement, and that is a real part of what a subscription buys. Ask which of the three a given platform actually produces before you compare it on price.
This is general information about how giving records work, not tax or legal advice. Your church’s accountant should rule on anything specific.
The questions that come up next
Does Zaap process donations?
No. A church links to giving from its Zaap page, and the gift is handled by Subsplash, Church Center, Tithe.ly or whichever processor the church already uses, on that provider’s form and into that church’s own account.
Which giving platforms work with a Zaap page?
All of them, because the tile holds a link. Subsplash, Church Center, a denominational portal or a plain hosted checkout all work the same way: paste the URL you already hand people.
What should a church say from the stage when it launches text giving?
Say one number and one word, twice. Put both on the screen behind you. Skip the amount instruction on a first announcement, because a first-time donor is sent to a web form to enter a payment method before the amount in their message means anything.
Is a text confirmation the same as a donation receipt?
An SMS confirmation is not the contemporaneous written acknowledgment the IRS requires for a single gift of $250 or more, so check what your platform issues at year end and who it issues it to.
Start with the page
A church that owns its page can add texting whenever the budget allows. One that leases a keyword first still needs the page.
Create your free church page, put the short URL in every bio and on every bulletin, and point the giving tile at the processor you already use. What else belongs on a church link page goes deeper, and the rest of the platform is worth a look once the page is live.
