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 · 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 | |
Prices as published on each vendor’s pricing page, checked September 2026. Planning Center People, the member database, is free and not counted. Card processing on gifts isn’t counted either: a church pays a processor on every gift whatever platform it uses, so it isn’t a cost any platform removes.
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, not a technical one. Each is answerable in a church that keeps one record per person. In a church running nine products, each one is a project.
Your people are one congregation. In most church software, they’re nine separate lists.
What one platform changes
The alternative isn’t a better version of any one of those products. It’s 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.
That changes three things.
Everything is in one place. One login for your staff, one place for your people, one list to keep up to date. We go through what that record holds in one member record.
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 by the Assistant, with the reason for each name and a drafted next step for your team to send.
What one plan costs instead
Socio Connect runs groups, check-in and kids safety, giving, registrations and ticketing, and serving teams on one record per person. It replaces five of the nine products above, about $437 a month of them. Messages are built in, texting is on the way, and an email newsletter tool you like can stay.
Plans are priced by active people: anyone who signed in, gave, checked in or RSVP’d in the last 90 days. A church of about 1,000 people is on the Community plan, $299 a month, if up to 750 of them are active, or the Complete plan, $599 a month, up to 2,000. Gifts go to your own Stripe account, with no platform fee on top of the card fee. Yearly billing is 10 months for 12.
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 lets you tick the tools you pay for, at your size, and see them beside one plan. Treat any result as an estimate, not a quote.
And what you add stays yours. You keep ownership of your church’s data and can export it any time.
When to stay where you are
If your church runs on two or three of these products, and nobody spends their Monday reconciling lists, stay. The stack is doing its job.
If you recognized your church in the table, and in the questions, sign up. Your 14-day free trial of the Community plan starts the day you sign up, with no card needed.