Someone asks how your charity can take a card at the door and the instinct is to price up a card machine. That instinct is about four years out of date, and acting on it usually costs a charity several hundred pounds or dollars it did not need to spend.
Here is what actually matters when a charity takes a card payment in person, and when a physical machine is still the right answer.
What a charity is really choosing between
There are three ways to take a card donation face to face, and they differ far more in commitment than in capability.
A phone you already own
Contactless acceptance is built into the hardware of recent iPhones and Android phones. The donor taps their card or their phone directly on your screen. There is nothing to buy, nothing to charge overnight, and nothing to lose in a church hall. Every volunteer with a phone becomes a collection point, which matters more at a fete or a gala than any feature on a spec sheet.
A small card reader
A pocket reader pairs to a phone over Bluetooth. It costs money up front, it needs charging, it needs pairing again when it forgets, and it is one more thing to hand between volunteers. It earns its place only if you are still taking chip and PIN from donors who do not have contactless cards.
A fixed terminal or donation kiosk
This is the one case where dedicated hardware genuinely wins. A kiosk in a cathedral entrance or a museum foyer has to stand on its own, unattended, all day. A phone cannot do that job. If this is what you are solving, buy the kiosk, and read no further.
Take donations on the phone in your pocket.
No reader to buy, no contract, and the card taps straight on the screen. Book a short demo and we will set it up with you.
The questions that actually decide it
Charities tend to compare the wrong things. These are the ones that change the outcome.
How many people need to collect at once?
This is the real question and almost nobody asks it. One terminal means one queue. If six volunteers are working a fundraising dinner, six phones means six queues and no bottleneck at the door. Hardware forces you to buy a machine per queue; phones do not.
Does a gift need to go to a specific fund?
A card machine takes an amount. It does not know that this gift was for the roof appeal and that one was for the food bank. If your accounts separate restricted from unrestricted giving, that distinction has to be captured at the point of the gift, or somebody reconstructs it from memory later.
What happens to the donor record?
A standalone terminal gives you a settlement figure and nothing else. No name, no email, no way to thank anyone or to send a statement in January. For a charity that is not a small detail, it is most of the value of the gift beyond the money itself.
Will the venue have signal?
Village halls, marquees and sports grounds are where this falls over. A phone can fall back to cellular data when the venue Wi-Fi does not exist, which is a practical advantage over anything that depends on the building.
What it costs, honestly
Card acceptance has a floor that nobody escapes. Interchange and card brand fees are set by the networks and every provider pays them. What differs is what sits on top: the monthly fee, the hardware, and the processing margin.
CoreMobile is $0 a month with no hardware to buy, and charges interchange and card brand fees at cost plus 0.50% and $0.10 per transaction. The thing to compare across any provider is not the headline rate on its own, it is the rate plus the monthly fee plus the hardware divided by how much you actually process.
The fee question donors ask
Someone will ask whether their whole gift reaches you. It is a fair question and the honest answer is that card processing always costs something.
What you can do is let the donor cover it. At checkout a donor can add the processing fee on top of their gift, and when they do, the full amount they intended lands in your account. Your organization decides whether that is offered as an option or set as required. It is not a tip to the platform, and there is no platform tip on CoreMobile at all.
So do you need a card machine?
If you are running a kiosk that stands unattended, yes. If you need chip and PIN for donors without contactless cards, a small reader is reasonable.
For everything else, which is most charity fundraising, the phone in your pocket is the machine. It takes the tap, it captures who gave, it knows which fund the gift was for, and it costs nothing to sit in a drawer between events.