A one-time donor gives once. A monthly donor gives roughly six to eight times as much over their lifetime, and costs you nothing extra to acquire after the first gift. Every fundraising professional knows this, which is why every donation plugin now advertises recurring giving. The advertising is accurate and almost entirely useless for choosing between them, because the feature that matters is not whether the plugin can charge a card every month. It is what happens when that card is declined.

Around a third of recurring donation cancellations are involuntary. Nobody decided to stop giving; a card expired, was reissued after a fraud alert, or was simply declined once and never retried intelligently. That is the single largest leak in most recurring programmes, and it is determined by plumbing that no vendor puts on their feature page. This article compares the plumbing, prices the platform fees honestly, and shows the volume at which each pricing model stops making sense.

Pricing verified August 2026. Note that one major product in this category changed its name and owner during 2026; details in the Give entry below.

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The arithmetic that should drive your choice

Donation tools price in two incompatible ways: a flat licence, or a percentage of everything you raise. The crossover between them arrives earlier than most organisations expect. Here is a nonprofit raising $60,000 a year in recurring gifts, with card processing excluded since it applies to every row equally.

Option	Licence cost	Platform fee	Annual total on $60,000
Charitable Plus	$99	0%	$99
WP Simple Pay Plus	$99.50	0%	$99.50
Paymattic Personal	~$60	0%	~$60
WPForms Pro	$199.50	0%	$199.50
Give Pro	$399	0%	$399
Donorbox Standard	$0	2.95% to 3.95%	$1,770 to $2,370
Donorbox Pro	$1,800	1.75% to 2%	$2,850 to $3,000

Two conclusions follow. First, a hosted platform’s percentage becomes the dominant cost almost immediately; at $60,000 a year Donorbox Standard costs more than four times Give Pro, the most expensive self-hosted option here. Second, and less obviously, Donorbox Pro does not pay for itself until roughly $150,000 a year, because $1,800 in fixed fees only beats the 1.2 point discount above that threshold. Organisations upgrade to Pro long before that point and lose money doing it.

None of which makes hosted platforms wrong. They are worth real money if you have no technical capacity, because a self-hosted stack means you own PCI scope, uptime, and the recurring engine’s failure modes. But make that trade knowingly rather than because the signup was free.

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The recurring features that actually move the number

Whose recurring engine is it?

This is the question to ask first and it is rarely answered on a feature page. A plugin either hands the subscription to Stripe Billing and lets Stripe own the schedule, or it stores a saved card and runs its own scheduler on WordPress cron. The difference is enormous. Stripe Billing brings the card-account updater, which automatically refreshes reissued Visa and Mastercard numbers before they fail, plus configurable smart retries that pick the statistically best moment to try again. A custom engine on WP cron brings none of that, and WP cron only fires when somebody visits your site.

Donor self-management

Can a donor update their own card, change their amount, or pause without emailing your office? If not, every card change becomes a support ticket, and the ones that do not become tickets become cancellations. A donor portal is worth more than most of the features vendors lead with.

Fee coverage

Offering donors the option to add processing fees to their gift is close to free money; take-up commonly runs well above half when the checkbox is pre-ticked and clearly worded. Nearly every tool here supports it. Check that it applies to recurring gifts and not just one-time ones, which is a surprisingly common gap.

Upgrade prompts

The highest-yield ask in fundraising is converting a one-time donor to monthly at the moment they give. A checkout that says “make this $25 monthly instead” converts a meaningful share of one-time gifts into recurring revenue, and it costs nothing to enable. Look for it explicitly.

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The 9 plugins compared

We have listed nine rather than rounding up to ten with products whose current pricing we could not confirm. An inaccurate price in a fundraising budget is worse than a shorter list.

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Comparison table

Tool	Cost for recurring	Platform fee	Donor portal	Best for
Give	$399/yr (Pro)	0%	Yes	Fundraising-first organisations
Charitable	$99/yr (Plus)	0%	Yes	Best overall value
Paymattic	Free, or ~$4.99/mo	0%	Yes	Tightest budgets
WP Simple Pay	$49.50 to $99.50/yr	0%	Via Stripe	Simplest reliable recurring
WPForms	$199.50/yr (Pro)	3% below Pro	No	Existing WPForms Pro sites
Donorbox	Free, or $150/mo	1.75% to 3.95%	Yes	No technical capacity
Ninja Forms	$199/yr	0%	No	Existing Ninja Forms sites
Forminator	Free	0%	No	Zero budget
Seamless Donations	Free	0%	No	PayPal-only donors

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Cutting involuntary churn

If you do nothing else after reading this, do these. They are configuration rather than fundraising strategy, they take an afternoon, and they recover donors you have already earned.

1. Turn on the Stripe card-account updater. It refreshes reissued Visa and Mastercard numbers automatically before a payment fails. It is a setting in your Stripe dashboard, it is free, and a surprising number of organisations have never opened that page.
2. Configure smart retries. Stripe will retry failed payments at statistically optimal intervals rather than hammering the card daily. Set a retry window of two to three weeks before the subscription is marked unpaid.
3. Write the dunning emails yourself. The defaults read like collections notices. A recurring donor who sees “Your payment failed” from a charity often reads it as a problem with the charity. Say instead that their card needs updating, thank them, and link straight to the update page.
4. Give donors a self-service portal. Every card change that requires an email to your office is a change that frequently does not happen at all.
5. Warn before expiry. Email at 30 and 7 days before a stored card expires. This converts a failure into a routine update.
6. Watch the failure rate monthly. If more than about 5% of recurring charges fail, something is misconfigured rather than your donors leaving.

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Frequently asked questions

Does Stripe offer nonprofit discounts?

Stripe offers reduced processing rates for eligible registered nonprofits in several countries, but you must apply; it is not applied automatically because you sell nothing. Apply before launching a monthly giving programme, since the saving compounds across every future recurring charge.

What happened to GiveWP?

It was rebranded to Give and consolidated under Liquid Web during 2026 when the StellarWP brand was retired. The plugin survives as one of four core products and remains actively developed, but the independent givewp.com site is gone and support now runs through Liquid Web.

Should I use PayPal, Stripe, or both?

Both, if your tool allows it. PayPal still converts a meaningful share of older donors who will not enter a card, while Stripe gives you far better recurring infrastructure. Where you can choose, route recurring gifts through Stripe and let PayPal handle one-time giving.

How much more is a monthly donor worth?

Commonly six to eight times a one-time donor over their lifetime, though it varies by cause and donor base. The important consequence is that converting existing one-time donors to monthly usually returns more than acquiring new donors, and costs a fraction as much.

Do I need a separate donor CRM?

Not below a few hundred donors. Give and Charitable both include enough donor management to run a small programme. Once you need segmentation, soft credits, or major-gift tracking, integrate with a CRM rather than stretching the plugin past its design.

Can donors change their amount without cancelling?

Only where there is a proper donor portal, which rules out the form-builder options. This matters more than it appears: a donor who wants to reduce their gift from $50 to $25 and cannot will frequently cancel entirely instead.

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The verdict

For most nonprofits: Charitable Plus at $99 a year. Real fundraising features, a donor portal, Stripe Billing underneath, and no platform fee. Nothing else here delivers that combination for the money.

If fundraising is your main online activity: Give Pro at $399. Fund designation, peer-to-peer, and reporting depth that Charitable does not reach. Factor the Liquid Web transition into your thinking, but the plugin itself remains the most capable option.

On the tightest budget: Paymattic. Recurring donations in the free version is close to unique, and paid tiers start around $4.99 a month if you outgrow it.

If you just want a form that works: WP Simple Pay. No transaction fees, Stripe Billing natively, and therefore better retention than several nonprofit-branded competitors. Accept that Stripe’s dashboard is your donor database.

If nobody on staff is technical: Donorbox, with the honest acknowledgement that you are paying $1,500 to $2,500 a year for that comfort at moderate volume. That can be entirely rational. Just calculate it once a year instead of never.

Whatever you pick, spend the first afternoon in your Stripe dashboard rather than your plugin settings. The card-account updater, retry schedule, and dunning emails will do more for recurring revenue this year than any feature you are choosing between above.