Best Shopify Donation Apps (2026): Round-Ups, % of Sales, and Compliance Compared
Adding charitable giving to your store is one of the few changes that can lift customer loyalty, average order value, and brand affinity at the same time. The hard part is not deciding to give back. It is choosing a Shopify donation app that matches how you actually want to give, fits your margin, and does not quietly leave you holding a stack of state charity filings. The donation category on the Shopify App Store has grown crowded, and the apps differ more than they look at first glance.
This guide compares the best Shopify donation apps of 2026 on the three things that actually separate them: the giving modes they support, how they handle compliance, and how they charge. The goal is not to crown one winner for everyone. It is to help you match an app to your store.
How to Choose a Shopify Donation App
Before comparing logos, get clear on four questions. They decide which app is right far more than the feature checklist on any listing does.
Who funds the donation
This is the first fork in the road. With round-ups, the customer rounds their total up to the nearest dollar and that change goes to charity. The shopper funds the gift, so your margin is untouched and participation is high because the ask is tiny. With percentage of sales, the brand donates a set share of each order. You fund it, which makes for a stronger marketing message you control, but it comes straight out of your contribution margin and, importantly, triggers more legal obligations.
Most serious giving programs eventually run both. So an app that supports round-ups and percentage of sales natively in checkout gives you room to grow without switching tools.
How the app charges
Donation app pricing comes in three shapes, and they are not equivalent.
- A flat monthly subscription, which can run from around $15/mo for entry plans up to several hundred or more at higher tiers, is predictable and does not scale with your generosity.
- A percentage of each donation sounds small but compounds. A 10 percent cut means a tenth of what your customers intended for charity never reaches it.
- A free-to-install model usually monetizes another way, so read carefully where the money actually comes from.
Pay attention to who absorbs the fee. A fee charged to you is a business cost. A fee deducted from the donation reduces what the charity receives, which is exactly the gap a skeptical customer will notice.
How giving affects compliance
This is the step most buyers skip, and it is the one that creates real exposure. The moment your storefront says a purchase benefits a charity, many US states can treat your store as a commercial co-venturer with its own registration, contract, disclosure, and reporting rules. We wrote a full breakdown in our guide to commercial co-venture compliance for Shopify brands, but the short version is that a single nationwide percentage-of-sales promise can pull you into more than a dozen different state regimes at once.
Donation apps handle this very differently. Some route funds through a donor-advised fund to simplify the money flow. Some handle parts of co-venturing. Some leave the filings entirely to you. Treat compliance as a primary selection criterion, not a footnote.
Whether donations are your only impact lever
Donations are one way to give back, but many brands also plant trees, fund plastic recovery, or offset carbon. If you are likely to run more than one of those, a single app that unifies them avoids paying, integrating, and reporting across three separate tools. We make the case for that approach in the unified impact stack.
The Best Shopify Donation Apps in 2026
Here are four donation apps worth shortlisting, with the honest tradeoffs of each. Pricing below was checked against each app’s Shopify App Store listing and pricing page in October 2026, so confirm the current details on each Shopify App Store listing before you commit.
| App | Giving modes | Compliance model | Pricing model |
|---|---|---|---|
| GoodAPI | Round-ups, % of sales, trees, plastic | CCV handled in all 50 states | Give $15/mo flat, up to 3 charities, no % cut; Lead $49/mo |
| ShoppingGives | Round-ups, % or $ of sales | Handles 501(c)(3) compliance | Starter $29/mo + 0.5% of donating-order value; Plus $595/mo |
| Give & Grow (Pledge) | Round-ups, add donation, embed | DAF disbursement, AB 488 | Free to install |
| DailyKarma | Round-ups, donate-for-discount | Handles co-venturing | Free with 10% + 3% card fee per donation; $299 or $700/mo |
GoodAPI: donations plus trees and plastic, compliance included
GoodAPI started as a verified tree-planting app and grew into a single impact platform that now includes charitable donations alongside reforestation and ocean-bound plastic recovery. In the cart or at checkout, shoppers can round up or a brand can contribute a percentage or a fixed amount, with donations routed to verified 501(c)(3) nonprofits drawn from a database of 1.3M registered charities.
The differentiator is what happens behind the scenes. GoodAPI takes on the commercial co-venturer registrations, written contracts, point-of-sale disclosures, and post-campaign reporting across all 50 states , so the merchant does not manage the filings that percentage-of-sales giving normally triggers. On the environmental side, trees are planted with Veritree, a verified reforestation organization whose projects are GPS-tracked and supported through the trees’ critical first years. GoodAPI’s free Grow plan is pay-as-you-go: the first 50 trees and 100 bottles are free, then $0.43/tree and $0.05/bottle with no monthly fee. Charitable giving comes with the $15/mo Give plan, a flat fee that covers up to 3 charities from the 1.3 million nonprofit network, cart round-ups, and percentage or fixed donations, with compliance handled and no percentage cut taken by GoodAPI, while the $49/mo Lead plan adds checkout round-ups, bespoke customization, and API access. The Shopify App Store listing carries a 5.0★ rating across 226 reviews. You can see how the GoodAPI Shopify donation app works, including round-ups and named causes, on our donations page.
Merchants who want named causes rather than a generic pool can feature live GoodAPI partner pages. Two examples are the Breast Cancer Research Foundation and Seek Her Foundation. Naming a specific nonprofit at checkout makes the donation ask clearer and more trustworthy for shoppers.
Brands that want donations, tree planting, and plastic recovery in one app with state-by-state compliance handled for them
ShoppingGives: broad nonprofit choice and clean disbursement
ShoppingGives is a well-established donation platform that lets brands donate a percentage or dollar amount of sales and handles the compliance for donating to 501(c)(3) nonprofits. Its Shopify App Store listing shows 4.3★ from 73 reviews, most of them 5 stars, and merchants praise the flexible donation rates and checkout integration.
Pricing has more moving parts than the headline suggests. As of October 2026, per the ShoppingGives pricing page, Starter is $29/mo ($24/mo billed annually) plus 0.5% of order value on orders that include a donation. Starter features up to 6 verified causes and requires a default cause, and letting customers search its 450,000 nonprofits is a $49/mo add-on. Plus runs $595/mo and Partner $1,493/mo billed monthly. It is a solid pick if donations are your only impact channel and you want a mature, donations-only platform. If the stacked fees are why you are comparing options, our ShoppingGives alternatives guide walks through the math at $20,000 a month in donating-order sales.
Stores focused purely on donations that want flexible rates and wide nonprofit coverage
Give & Grow by Pledge: round-ups with DAF-backed disbursement
Give & Grow, built by Pledge on top of the Pledgeling Foundation, connects stores to verified nonprofits worldwide and supports round-ups, add-a-donation, and donations embedded with product sales. Pledge disburses funds through its donor-advised fund and states that it is AB 488 compliant, which simplifies the money flow for many merchants. The app is free to install, with Pledge monetizing through its donation infrastructure.
Merchants who want round-ups with international nonprofit reach and DAF-managed disbursement
DailyKarma (Shop for Good): conversion-focused giving
DailyKarma, listed as Shop for Good, leans into giving as a conversion tactic with features like donate-for-discount and round-up for charity, and it provides a charity database while handling parts of co-venturing compliance. As of October 2026, its free Startup Brands plan deducts a 10% donation processing fee plus a 3% card fee from each donation, and paid plans run $299/mo (Emerging Brands) and $700/mo (Scaling Brands). Its listing shows 4.6★ from 88 reviews. The percentage model can be reasonable if the conversion lift pays for itself, but it does reduce what reaches the charity, so model the math for your volume.
Stores that want donation mechanics tied directly to discounts and conversion experiments
Which Donation App Is Right for Your Store
Match the app to your situation rather than to its review count.
If you only need donations and want the widest nonprofit selection, ShoppingGives and Give & Grow are both safe, mature choices, with Give & Grow’s free-to-install model attractive for smaller stores. If you want to wire giving directly into discounts and conversion tests, DailyKarma is built for that, just keep an eye on the per-donation fee, which comes out of what reaches the charity.
If your giving is going to extend beyond donations into tree planting or plastic recovery, or if you would rather not own the commercial co-venture filings at all, that is where GoodAPI is worth a serious look. Instead of stitching together a donation app, a tree-planting app, and a plastic app, each with its own fee and its own reporting, you run one platform that covers all three and absorbs the state-by-state compliance work. For brands that treat impact as a long-term channel rather than a one-off campaign, the consolidation tends to pay off, both in overhead and in the verifiable impact story you can show customers.
Get Started
Whichever app you choose, the implementation bar in 2026 is low: most install in minutes and add a giving option to checkout the same day. Once an app is in place, the next decision is which causes to feature, and that choice carries its own trust and compliance weight: our guide on how to choose a charity for your Shopify checkout walks through vetting nonprofits properly. If you want donations, verified tree planting, and plastic recovery under one roof with compliance handled, you can install the GoodAPI app from the Shopify App Store or read more about how giving works on our donations page. Whatever you pick, decide on your giving model and your compliance plan first, then let the app do the rest.