The price of ACH bank donations will go up on October 31st, 2022 from $0.25 to $0.30 per transaction. There is still no transaction % fee.
| Important: This change is happening as part of the rollout of Stripe Financial Connections, our new bank verification provider. |
Price increases are no fun. We don’t make money from processing fees, and raising costs is something we’re not quick to do. However, we’re confident that Stripe Financial Connections is a better fit for our US customers who depend on ACH donations – a payment method that relies on fast and safe bank account verification.
Why $0.05?
After crunching all the numbers, we determined that $0.05 was the lowest amount we could raise fees to cover the additional cost of Stripe Financial Connections. Tying the cost of ACH verification to the usage of ACH made the most sense. As you might guess, bank account verification scales linearly with the amount of ACH usage for nearly all of our US customers, large or small.
What about existing recurring donations?
All ACH donations will be processed at the new rate beginning 10/31/2022. This includes recurring donations that were set up before 10/31/2022.
How does this impact “cover the fee”?
Cover the fee is an optional feature in Planning Center Giving that asks donors if they want to give little bit more to cover the administrative cost of processing the transaction itself. If your church has enabled this feature, the processing fee for ACH will read $0.30 instead of $0.25 beginning 10/31/2022.
This new price applies to all ACH donations including those originally set up before 10/31/2022 where the fee was covered. It means the fee is no longer completely covered by the donor and the church will “net” $0.05 less starting 10/31/2022. If a donor wishes, they can re-establish a new recurring donation after 10/31/2022 to make sure 100% of the fee is covered. If you really wanted to, you could use a List in Planning Center People to contact all these donors and let them know about the $0.05 price bump to their existing recurring donations – here's how!
Can I opt out of Stripe Financial Connections?
No. Our ACH donation system relies on fast, safe bank account verification provided by Stripe Financial Connections. This new system allows us to combine manual verification and instant verification into a single user experience (instead of a choice that the donor has to decide on right from the beginning). Stripe Financial Connections handles both types of verification—simplifying the congregant experience and the coding process.
Again, Planning Center doesn’t make money from processing fees. We structured it this way from the very beginning because we wanted to ensure that our interests were aligned with our customers when it comes to processing fees. In the long run, we believe the extra $0.05 for ACH processing is worth the advantages of using Stripe Financial Connections, allowing your donors to verify their bank accounts more easily, quickly, and with more confidence.