A church app buys one thing, and it costs $1,068 a year

A church of 160 spent $1,068 in a year on a custom app. Nineteen people installed it. Eleven of those were staff, elders, or their spouses. The eight remaining users could have been handed the sermon audio on a flash drive for less money.

That is an argument against buying an app before you can predict who will install it.

What an app does that a website cannot

Exactly one thing: push notifications. An app can put a sentence on a member’s lock screen without permission from an email provider or a social platform’s ranking algorithm.

Everything else on the feature list is a website. Sermon audio, the calendar, giving, group sign-ups, prayer requests, the directory, live streaming. All of those work in a mobile browser and all of them are one tap from a home screen icon if a member adds the site as a bookmark.

So the buying question is narrow. Is a lock-screen notification worth the annual cost, given how many of your people will install it?

For a few churches the answer is yes. A congregation with a large young-family population, an active midweek schedule, and volunteers who need same-day reminders gets real use out of push. A congregation whose median member is 62 and whose main channel is a Sunday bulletin does not.

Note that text messaging also reaches a lock screen, reaches everyone with a phone, and requires no installation. It also carries a consent obligation an app does not, because the FCC’s rules bar initiating an autodialed call or prerecorded message without “the prior express consent of the called party,” with narrow provisions for tax-exempt nonprofits and a requirement to honor opt-outs (47 CFR 64.1200). Get the opt-in properly and texting still beats an app on reach and cost for most churches under 300 people. The full price comparison across texting platforms is in church texting services.

What they cost, read off the vendor pages on 29 July 2026

Planning Center Church Center has a free Essential tier covering app setup, the home page, and analytics, with Plus at $15 a month for custom pages and themes and Premium at $32 a month for audio and video channels and sermon notes (Church Center). It is a shared branded app rather than a custom-built one, meaning your church appears inside it with your name and logo. If you already run Planning Center, you have an app. Test whether your people use it before you pay anyone for a second one.

Tithely lists a standalone Custom Church App at $89 per month, and includes an app in its All-Access bundle at $119 per month, marked down on the page from $228 (Tithely pricing). At $89 monthly that is $1,068 a year. Tithely also lists Church Management at $72 a month, a website at $19, Free Giving at $0, and a one-time Premium Onboarding fee of $599, so run the bundle arithmetic against the modules you would actually turn on.

Subsplash sells apps inside Subsplash One, which the pricing page describes as “Pricing based on church size and usage” with no figure printed. Subsplash Giving is separately listed at $0 per month with card processing at 2.3 percent plus 30 cents and ACH at 1 percent, and a program called GrowCurve reduces those to as low as 1.9 percent plus 30 cents and 0.5 percent for eligible churches (Subsplash pricing). If you request a quote, ask for the app line item separately so you can compare it to $1,068, and ask what qualifies a church for GrowCurve and what happens when it stops qualifying.

Building your own is covered below. First, the number to beat is $1,068 a year, and the free option already sitting inside Planning Center is the honest benchmark for whether anyone will install anything.

Building your own is the expensive answer disguised as the cheap one. Native app development, app store accounts, annual review cycles, OS version breakage, and the volunteer developer who moves away. Churches that start here almost always end up on a hosted product two years later, having spent more.

Four numbers to gather before you spend anything

Do this over 60 days. It costs nothing and it decides the question.

One: adoption ceiling. Send one text or email asking people to reply YES if they would install a church app and turn on notifications. The count of yes replies is your optimistic ceiling. Actual installs land well below what people say they will do.

Two: your current email open rate. Pull it from your email tool. If your Wednesday email is being opened by most of the households you send it to, the communication problem you are trying to solve with an app may not exist.

Three: the free-app test. If you have Church Center or any free member app available, publish it, promote it from the front for four weeks, and count installs. That number is the honest forecast for a paid app, because the paid one will not be more compelling to a 58-year-old member than the free one was.

Four: the annual number written as a staff line. $1,068 a year is a paid nursery worker for a season, or the CCLI license, or the security deposit on the fellowship hall’s new tables. Put the app next to the thing it displaces, not next to zero.

Decision rule: if the free-app test produces installs from fewer than a quarter of your active households, do not buy a paid app. Fix the texting list instead.

The objection worth taking seriously

A church app is a device that promises the church in your pocket, and the promise is partly false in a way that matters.

The church is a gathered body. Word preached to people in a room, the table taken with hands, the water, the singing that requires other voices, the elder who can see your face. An app delivers audio, text, and a giving form. It cannot deliver any of the four things the New Testament treats as constitutive of the assembly.

That mismatch usually stays harmless. It becomes harmful when a congregation begins measuring itself by app engagement, when sermon plays start functioning as attendance, or when a member drifts from the room into the feed and the church has no way to notice because the dashboard still shows them as active.

Streaming did this at scale and the effects are still being counted. Many churches discovered that a service available at home is a service some households will take at home indefinitely, and that the reasons are rarely the ones the church assumed. The national picture is consistent with it: Pew Research Center’s 2023 to 2024 Religious Landscape Study, fielded to 36,908 respondents, found 33 percent of US adults attend religious services at least once a month (Pew Research Center), which is the environment any tool you buy is operating in. An app accelerates the drift when it is positioned as a way to participate rather than a way to be reminded. The same decision applies one layer down to the stream itself, in church live streaming setup.

The discipline is in the positioning. An app is a bulletin board and a reminder service. It carries the announcement, the address, the schedule, the passage for Sunday, and the note that the meal starts at six. It never presents itself as a place where the church happens, and the church never celebrates its download count.

Ask one question of any vendor pitch: does this tool point people toward the room, or does it offer them an alternative to the room? The answer is usually visible in the demo.

If you do buy one

Six rules that keep it useful.

1. One push a week, maximum. The first pointless notification costs you a portion of your users permanently, and they do not come back.
2. Every push names a time, a place, and an action. “Youth meets Wednesday 6:30 in the fellowship hall, bring a friend” beats “Don’t miss Wednesday!”
3. Do not put a donation prompt in a push notification. Ever.
4. No engagement scores, no streaks, no badges. Gamifying Bible reading trains people to perform a habit rather than to read.
5. Someone owns it by name. Content goes stale in an app faster than on a website, and a church app showing last month’s events is worse than no app.
6. Review the number at twelve months. Active installs, pushes sent, and whether attendance at the events you promoted changed. If you cannot show a difference, cancel it. Cancelling a tool that did not work is a normal act of stewardship, not an admission of failure.

The alternative most churches should choose

Spend the $1,068 on a texting plan and a person who writes well. Clearstream lists a Free plan at 100 message credits a month and a Standard plan at $29 a month for 1,250 credits, with credits consumed per recipient, so a 300-person list at $29 covers roughly four plain sends a month (Clearstream pricing, checked 29 July 2026). Four well-written messages a month, each with a time, a place, and a name, for $348 a year rather than $1,068.

Keep the website’s Visit page current, which is the actual first impression and costs $19 a month at the high end according to Tithely’s own website line, or nothing at all on the paths in website options for a small church. Print a bulletin that a visitor can carry to their car.

Then, if in a year you can point to a specific group of people you cannot reach any other way, buy the app for them.

Compare current tools in the church texting directory, see what a weekly message should actually say in church announcement examples, and if the app pitch arrived attached to a giving upgrade, price the giving side on its own in what giving platforms actually cost your church.

Sources

• Planning Center Church Center, Essential free, Plus $15 per month, Premium $32 per month. Checked 29 July 2026.
• Tithely pricing, Custom Church App $89 per month, All-Access $119 per month, Church Management $72, website $19, Premium Onboarding $599 one time. Checked 29 July 2026.
• Subsplash pricing, Subsplash One quote-only, Giving $0 per month at 2.3 percent plus 30 cents and 1 percent ACH, GrowCurve as low as 1.9 percent and 0.5 percent. Checked 29 July 2026.
• Clearstream pricing, Free at 100 credits, Standard $29 at 1,250 credits. Checked 29 July 2026.
• 47 CFR 64.1200, via Cornell Legal Information Institute. Checked 29 July 2026.
• Pew Research Center, Decline of Christianity in the US has slowed, may have leveled off. Checked 29 July 2026.

No app store install-rate figure is quoted anywhere in this post, because no independent source publishes one for church apps. The four-number test above exists so a church can measure its own instead.