About Pushpay: Strengthening communities through digital giving

Pushpay helps churches grow their communities by facilitating tithes, gifts, and other payments while supporting engagement with members. The platform enables churches to process one-time or recurring contributions efficiently, creating a seamless giving experience for congregations. Early on, Pushpay processed around $1 million per year in gifts, and today handles roughly $3 billion annually, supporting ACH, credit cards, and other payment methods through Spreedly.

The Problem: Managing high-volume spikes and downtime

Processing payments for churches comes with unique challenges. Contributions are not exchanged for goods or services, and payment activity spikes significantly on high-traffic days, such as Sundays in the United States. Trust is paramount, and any disruption in payment processing could erode confidence in the platform and the church itself. 

Early in its development, Pushpay had to manage multiple gateways directly, and any outage could result in delayed or failed transactions, creating frustration for church members and staff. The team needed a way to maintain payment reliability, quickly identify errors, and manage scheduled payments even during service interruptions.

The Solution: Building resilience with automated queuing

Pushpay established a system to monitor processing and classify errors, separating user-recoverable issues from gateway or communication failures and unknown errors that required further investigation. With Spreedly’s dashboard, the on-call team can quickly access transaction details to assess and resolve problems. Scheduled payments are temporarily queued during outages and automatically processed once gateways are back online. This proactive approach ensures that contributors’ payments are not lost or delayed. The system, now marketed as Assured Payments, provides churches with the confidence that donations will be processed reliably, even during unexpected interruptions.

The Results: Guaranteed donations and member trust

By leveraging Spreedly, Pushpay has created a resilient, trustworthy payment system that supports millions of dollars in church contributions each year. Queued payments are managed efficiently, errors are quickly addressed, and churches can focus on community engagement rather than payment issues. The Assured Payments feature reinforces trust among members and ensures that churches can continue to operate smoothly, strengthening the communities they serve.