Ask a church administrator what software the church runs on and you’ll usually hear one name. Ask what they log into on a Monday morning and the list gets longer: one product for groups, another for kids’ check-in, another for giving, another for event sign-ups, another for the volunteer schedule, a texting service, an email tool, a form builder, and the app.
Each one was a sensible decision when it was made. Each one solves its job well. Together they’re a stack, and a stack has costs that no single invoice shows.
What the stack costs, at published prices
Here is the most common tool for each job in a church, at the price each vendor publishes for a church of about 1,000 people. Planning Center prices each product on its own measure, so we’ve sized each one for a church that size: about half the church in groups, around 500 check-ins on a Sunday and 500 gifts a month, 400 at the largest event, and 150 people serving on teams. Where a product isn’t priced by size, it’s the plan most churches start on.
| The job | Product and plan | A month |
|---|---|---|
| Groups & small groups | Planning Center Groups · up to 500 people in groups | $69 |
| Check-in & attendance | Planning Center Check-Ins · up to 500 daily check-ins | $115 |
| Giving & donation forms | Planning Center Giving · up to 500 donations a month | $69 |
| Events & registration | Planning Center Registrations · up to 400 attendees at your largest event | $115 |
| Volunteer scheduling | Planning Center Services · up to 150 team members | $69 |
| Mailchimp · Essentials | $13 | |
| Texting | Text In Church · Core | $30 |
| Forms & sign-ups | Jotform · Bronze | $34 |
| Member app | Planning Center Publishing (Church Center app) · Essential | Free |
| Nine products, eight of them paid | $514 | |
That’s about $6,168 a year before anyone has spent an hour on it. Your numbers will differ: a smaller church pays less, some churches use fewer of these, and plenty swap one product for another. The shape is what matters. A church that thinks it runs on one system is usually paying for nine.
And the invoices are the visible part.
The cost that doesn’t appear on an invoice
Every one of those products keeps its own list of people. The guest who filled in a connect card, checked their kids in the next Sunday, joined a group a month later and started giving after that exists four times, in four places, and none of those places know about the others.
So somebody reconciles them. Exports, spreadsheets, a weekly hour spent matching names between systems, a follow-up that slips because the check-in data didn’t reach the person who makes the calls. You know how many hours that is at your church better than any survey does. Count them, and put them next to the invoices.
Then there are the questions nobody can answer, because the answer lives across two or three of those products at once.
- Who stopped attending and stopped giving in the same month?
- Who comes on Sundays but isn’t in a small group?
- Which first-time guests came back a second and third time, and which group did they join?
- Which volunteers serve every week and are at risk of burning out?
Each of those is a pastoral question, and each is answerable in a church that keeps one record per person. In a church running nine products, each one is a project.
What one platform changes
The alternative is one platform that does the jobs that hold your people, so that every visit, check-in, gift, sign-up and group lands on the same person. A better version of any single product on that list wouldn’t do that.
That changes three things.
Everything is in one place. One login for your staff, one app for your people, one list to keep up to date. We go through what that holds in what changes when every tool shares one person.
You can see where everyone is. Because every step lands on one record, you can see the path each person takes from first visit to serving, and where people stall on the way in. We wrote about this as knowing where everyone is.
You can act on who needs you. The first-time guests with no follow-up, the regulars who have missed three Sundays, the monthly gifts that stopped: brought to you every week, with the next step one tap away. Every church asks different questions, so the views that answer yours are part of the build.
What owning it costs instead
A Socio Connect Community build, which covers groups, check-in and attendance, giving, registrations and serving teams in one place, is $45,000–$65,000, once. It replaces five of the nine products above, about $437 a month of them; an email newsletter tool and texting can stay connected, or be added to the build. Your own iOS and Android app instead of the Church Center app is our Full Platform build, from $75,000. After launch you pay hosting to your own cloud provider, $200–$800 a month depending on size, and no platform fees. Stewardship plans are optional.
Whether that works out cheaper for your church depends on your stack, your plans and the hours your team spends between systems. We’re not going to guess it for you. The stack calculator opens on this same 1,000-person church; change any number to match what you actually pay and it shows the difference year by year, with hosting included.
And the platform is yours. The code, the data and the app belong to your church. If a vendor changes its pricing or its roadmap, it isn’t your problem anymore.
When to stay where you are
If your church is under about 1,000 people, runs on two or three of these products, and nobody spends their Monday reconciling lists, stay. The stack is doing its job and a build would be solving a problem you don’t have yet.
If you recognized your church in the table, and in the questions, the conversation is worth having. Bring your list of products to the call and we’ll go through it with you, including whether a build makes sense yet. Book a 30-minute call.
Further reading: add up what your tools cost today, Socio Connect vs Planning Center, product by product, and what a church platform includes.