What Church Software Costs at Four Congregation Sizes

A church of 1,200 people running a normal stack pays about $6,528 a year for software and about $38,400 a year to card networks on its online giving. The first number goes in the budget under software. The second comes out of the offering before the offering is counted, so it appears in no budget.

Every figure on this page was read off a vendor’s own pricing page on 29 July 2026 and is linked where it is used. Where a vendor publishes no price, the page says so.

The short answer, at four sizes

Church software costs roughly $1,100 a year at 80 people, $2,700 at 200, $4,200 at 500 and $6,500 at 1,200. Card processing on online giving adds two to six times that, so the total lands near $40 per attender per year at every size, and three quarters of it is payment processing.

The subscription column adds a records system, a texting service, a website, presentation software and a stream to your own site, each at the tier that size of church needs. The processing column applies the standard 2.9 percent plus 30 cents card rate to half of a congregation’s giving.

Why the prices are hard to compare

Every vendor meters on a different unit.

A church knows how many people were in the room on Sunday, and no vendor in that table bills on that number. A records system that meters on names counts everyone who ever filled in a card. A congregation of 200 on a Sunday routinely carries 300 or 400 names, because members who moved away, adult children and eight years of guest cards are still rows in the table. If you price the 250-name tier because 200 people come on Sunday, the invoice arrives at the 500-name tier. Export your own file and count the rows before you shop.

Records systems

This is the one category where the vendor you pick changes the answer by a factor of eight.

• ChurchTrac paid yearly, priced on names
• Planning Center six products, six meters

Prices read off each vendor's own pricing page on 29 July 2026. ChurchTrac is priced on names, taken here as one and a half times the Sunday count, so the four columns sit on the 125, 500, 1,000 and unlimited name tiers. Planning Center is the sum of six products at the tiers in the table below. The two flat-rate systems, Breeze at $864 a year and Servant Keeper core at $879.89, would draw as horizontal lines between the two plotted here.

See the numbers

Vendor	80 people	200 people	500 people	1,200 people
ChurchTrac	$194	$583	$778	$972
Planning Center	$900	$2,100	$4,524	$7,728

The gap between the two lines is $706 a year at 80 people and $6,756 a year at 1,200. The flat-rate systems change the picture again. At 120 names the flat rate is four and a half times the metered rate, so a small church that buys one overpays by about $670 a year. At 1,800 names the flat rate is the cheapest thing in the category, $108 a year under ChurchTrac’s unlimited tier and $6,864 under Planning Center.

ChurchTrac

ChurchTrac costs $9 a month at 75 names, $18 at 125, $36 at 250, $54 at 500, $72 at 1,000 and $90 for unlimited names. Paying yearly multiplies the monthly rate by 10.8 instead of 12, which the ChurchTrac pricing page calculates on the page, so the 250-name tier is $388.80 a year. Fund accounting is a $15 a month add-on, texting is $7 a month for 250 credits, and data import is free.

The name meter is the risk. When a database grows past a tier boundary, the bill steps by 50 to 100 percent, and tidying does not remove a name that a family still expects to find in the directory. Nobody buying on price should skip it, and a church that needs deep customization should look elsewhere.

Breeze

Breeze costs $72 a month. The Breeze pricing page states no setup fee, no contract and no tiers based on growth, with unlimited admin users and unlimited people, and giving is included. Texting gives 250 messages a month and then charges $10 per 500, which is 2 cents a message. Worship planning is a separate $29 a month, which brings a church that needs it to $1,212 a year.

It costs $864 a year whether you have 80 people or 8,000, so the smaller you are the worse the deal. A congregation under about 250 names pays for headroom it will not use for years.

Servant Keeper

Servant Keeper costs $79.99 a month, or $73.32 a month paid annually, which the Servant Keeper pricing page prints as $879.89 a year. Families and members are unlimited, and the meter is estimated users, 4 on core and 8 on complete. Complete costs $146.66 a month paid annually, or $1,759.89 a year, and adds a website, an app, 1,000 texts a month, a 50 GB media library and 25 hours a month of 720p streaming.

Check-in is a $199 option on the core plan, and 4 users runs short when a children’s director, a worship leader and a treasurer each want a login. A church that would use fewer than four of the things on the complete plan is buying a bundle to get one item.

Planning Center

Planning Center’s pricing page gives every product the same ladder of $0, $15, $32, $69, $115, $179 and $239 a month and then meters each product on a different counter. People is free and unlimited, and so is Publishing Essential. A church that runs the six products most churches run pays this.

The meters move independently, so one big event in June can push Registrations up two tiers and nothing else about the church changed. The free tiers are small: 5 team members, 10 daily check-ins, 15 group members, 10 monthly donations and 1 room, and a church of 60 people exceeds every one of them. A church that wants only a membership database should take People and stop there, because the bill starts when you add the second product.

Every number on that page is published and every meter is named. The arithmetic above is what it takes to compare it with a flat rate. For the decision framework see choosing church management software, and for where each free tier stops see free church management software.

The four categories that barely move with size

• Texting Clearstream
• Website The Church Co
• Presentation Proclaim
• Streaming Resi

Prices read off each vendor's own pricing page on 29 July 2026. Streaming reads $0 at 80 people because a church that size can send a phone or an OBS feed straight to a social platform for nothing.

See the numbers

Vendor	80 people	200 people	500 people	1,200 people
Texting	$292	$292	$490	$980
Website	$348	$348	$588	$588
Presentation	$270	$270	$400	$400
Streaming	$0	$1,188	$1,908	$3,588

Texting is metered on outgoing credits, so it scales with how often you send. Clearstream costs $29 a month for 1,250 credits, $49 for 2,500, $99 for 6,000 and $199 for 12,000, with 16 percent off for paying annually, no contract and no setup fee, and incoming texts and all email are free. Text In Church costs $369 a year for 500 credits a month, $668 for 1,500 and $967 for 2,500, with unlimited users and contacts and 3 cents a message over the limit. Six sends a month to a 720-person opted-in list is 4,320 credits, which fits Clearstream’s $99 tier. Twelve sends a month is 8,640 credits, which is the $199 tier, and the annual bill goes from $979.84 to $1,979.84 for the same list. Type your own number below, and see church texting services for the full comparison.

Free tool you can try here

What texting costs for a year

Type how many texts your church sends in a month and see the yearly cost on each service that publishes a price.

This free tool is made by Church Posting.

Texts your church sends in a month A church of 180 sends about 720 when it texts each member four times a month.

Texting for a year, lowest first

Use it free

The calculator is free, and the full version adds church management, giving and streaming to the same sheet.

Websites do not scale with congregation size. The Church Co costs $29 a month paid yearly on Basic, $49 on Premium and $199 on Ultimate, with a free simple setup on any yearly plan and paid setup packages at $299, $799 and $999. Nucleus costs $99 a month or $1,188 a year, and paying yearly saves nothing. What moves the price is how many pages somebody else builds for you. See small church website options.

Presentation software also ignores size. Proclaim costs $269.99 a year on On Air, $399.99 on Pro Media and $999.99 on Partner Media, with monthly rates of $26.99, $39.99 and $99.99, so paying annually saves about 17 percent. EasyWorship costs $210 a year billed yearly at $17.50 a month, with a higher tier at $330. No price appears on renewedvision.com/propresenter or on the front page of the accounts store as fetched on 29 July 2026, so this page carries none for ProPresenter. Ask for a written quote, since the rest of that category is in presentation and lyrics software, and Church Posting’s church slides are free.

Streaming is the one category with a true zero. A church sending a feed to a social platform pays nothing for the software, and the bill starts when the stream has to reach your own site and survive a bad connection. Resi prints $99 a month and $1,188 a year for Social Only, $159 and $1,908 for Starter Lite, which is the first tier that streams to your own website with 200 GB of monthly bandwidth, and $299 and $3,588 for Pro. The three annual figures are exactly twelve times the monthly rates printed beside them, although the page’s toggle advertises 20 percent off for annual billing, so ask what the month-to-month rate is.

Four of the five subscription categories are flat or nearly flat, so a church that budgets by growth is budgeting the wrong variable. The variable that grows is the offering, and the next section is about it.

Card fees

Faith Communities Today’s 2020 national survey put the median congregation’s annual income at $120,000, with 85 percent from individual donations and an average of $2,000 per person a year, against a median weekly attendance of 65 (Faith Communities Today 2020 summary report). Per capita giving falls as a congregation grows, so the largest column below runs high. so replace it with your own total.

Take the $2,000 figure, assume half of it arrives online and assume an average online gift of $100. Then apply the standard card rate published by Tithely and used as the benchmark in Subsplash’s savings calculator, 2.9 percent plus 30 cents.

The last three columns are published rates. Tithely charges 2.9 percent plus 30 cents on cards and 1 percent plus 30 cents on bank transfer. Subsplash charges 2.3 percent plus 30 cents on cards and 1 percent on bank transfer with no per-transaction fee, and says the card rate can fall as low as 1.9 percent under a program whose qualifying rules it does not publish. Planning Center charges 2.15 percent plus 30 cents on cards and 0 percent plus 30 cents on bank transfer.

On Planning Center’s schedule, moving a 1,200-person congregation’s online giving from cards to bank transfer takes processing from $38,400 to $3,600, a saving of $34,800 a year, which is five and a half times the whole software stack. At 200 people the saving is $5,800, more than double the stack. At 80 people it is $2,320, twice the stack. The change takes one sentence on the giving page and a default on the recurring gift form. Type your own giving below to see what four platforms keep.

Free tool you can try here

What your giving platform keeps

Type what your church receives online in a year and see what four platforms would keep, at the rates each one publishes.

This free tool is made by Church Posting.

Online giving in a year, in dollars With 60 percent on cards, 30 on bank transfer and 10 on American Express, and gifts averaging $100.

Fees for a year, lowest first

Use it free

The calculator is free, and the full version splits cards, bank transfers and American Express across eight platforms.

The processing fee never appears as an invoice because it is deducted from each gift before the deposit lands. A church can argue for a decade about a $72 a month subscription while paying six times that in processing on the same platform. The full fee table, including the receipting rules a statement has to satisfy, is in what giving platforms cost your church.

Costs no price list shows

Per-message overage

Every texting plan has a ceiling and charges differently past it. Clearstream sells extra credits at $10 per 125, which is 8 cents a message. Text In Church charges 3 cents, ChurchTrac $7 per 250, which is 2.8 cents, and Breeze $10 per 500, which is 2 cents. The vendor with the lowest headline price does not have the lowest overage, so count your sends for one month before you pick a tier.

Setup and onboarding

Servant Keeper prices check-in as a $199 option. Text In Church sells Concierge Account Setup starting at $249. The Church Co charges $299, $799 or $999 for anything past its free nine-page build. ChurchTrac states free data import. None of these appears in a monthly price, and all of them appear in year one.

The tier cliff

ChurchTrac steps from $36 to $54 a month between 250 and 500 names, a 50 percent increase. Planning Center steps from $69 to $115 between 200 and 500 daily check-ins, a 67 percent increase, and the counter that triggers it is the busiest single day of the year. Find where your nearest cliff sits and how far you are from it in every product before you sign.

Migration labor

Independent Sector and the Do Good Institute at the University of Maryland put the value of a volunteer hour at $36.14 for 2025, announced on 21 April 2026 (Independent Sector, value of volunteer time). A move between records systems takes an export, a cleanup of duplicate households, a field mapping, a test import, a real import and retraining for whoever runs the office. Sixteen hours of that is $578, forty hours is $1,446 and sixty hours is $2,168. Against a $670 a year saving, the arithmetic often says stay.

Annual billing

Paying yearly saves 10 percent at ChurchTrac, 8 percent at Servant Keeper, 16 percent at Clearstream, 17 percent at Text In Church, 17 percent at Proclaim and an advertised 20 percent at Resi, and it saves nothing at Nucleus. You also pay for twelve months of a product you have used for none. Take the annual discount on the tool you have run for a year, and pay monthly for anything you are still testing.

Work out your own number

The tables above are worked examples. The free software cost calculator takes your own counts for names, texts, giving and streaming and adds the yearly total, and it runs in your browser with nothing sent anywhere. Planning Center is the one line it handles separately, because its bill needs six counts instead of one.

Which stack to buy

What to do in the next two weeks

1. Pull last year’s online giving and split it into card and bank transfer. Multiply the card volume by 2.9 percent, add 30 cents per gift and write the dollar figure on one line. Take it to the next finance or elders meeting as dollars, since $6,400 gets argued about and a percentage does not.
2. Rewrite the giving page to name the saving in dollars. Giving by bank transfer instead of card sends about $29 more of every $1,000 to the church. Make bank transfer the first option on the form and the default on recurring gifts, because a recurring donor sets it once and never revisits it.
3. Export your database and count the rows. Find where the next tier boundary sits on every product you pay for and how many rows away it is. A church within 10 percent of a cliff has a price rise coming that nobody decided.
4. Decide whether to switch vendors only after those three. Price the switch with the new subscription, the setup fee and the migration hours at $36.14. If the annual saving is under $700 and the migration is over twenty hours, stay where you are and spend the effort on the giving page. Before you commit either way, ask what the platform lets you take with you when you leave, and get the answer in writing. See protecting the data a church holds about its members.

If the accounting side started all this, fund tracking is covered in church accounting software. Current options by category are in the church management directory, and how we review software explains how those rows are built.

Two plain CSV files hold the numbers. The price book, 29 July 2026 has every plan read for this page as one row, with category, vendor, product, plan, list price, billing period, annual equivalent, meter, tier limit, source URL and date checked, for fifteen vendors and 120 rows, including the row that says ProPresenter publishes no price. The cost model, 29 July 2026 holds the four worked columns as 31 numbered lines, with the input rows separated from the calculated rows.

Sources

Every price above was read off the page below on the date given. A vendor changes its rates on its own schedule, so check the page before you budget.

• ChurchTrac pricing. Name tiers at $9, $18, $36, $54, $72 and $90 a month, yearly multiplier 10.8, accounting $15 a month, messaging $7 a month for 250 credits. Checked 29 July 2026.
• Breeze ChMS pricing. $72 a month flat, no setup fee, no contract, no tiers, giving included, 250 texts a month then $10 per 500, Worship Tools $29 a month. Checked 29 July 2026.
• Planning Center pricing. Per-product ladder at $0, $15, $32, $69, $115, $179 and $239 a month, with the meter named for each product, plus card at 2.15 percent and 30 cents and ACH at 0 percent and 30 cents. Checked 29 July 2026.
• Servant Keeper pricing. Core $79.99 a month or $879.89 a year, complete $159.99 a month or $1,759.89 a year, check-in $199 optional on core. Checked 29 July 2026.
• Clearstream pricing. Eleven credit tiers, from free at 100 credits through $499 for 35,000 and on to $5,400 for 500,000, 16 percent off annually with no annual figure printed, extra credits $10 per 125. Checked 29 July 2026.
• Text In Church pricing. Basic $369, Pro $668 and Premium $967 a year, 3 cents a message over the limit, Concierge setup from $249. Checked 29 July 2026.
• The Church Co pricing. Basic $29, Premium $49 and Ultimate $199 a month paid yearly, setup packages free, $299, $799 and $999. Checked 29 July 2026.
• Nucleus pricing. $99 a month or $1,188 a year, no annual discount. Checked 29 July 2026.
• Resi pricing. Social Only $1,188, Starter Lite $1,908 and Pro $3,588 a year, against printed monthly rates of $99, $159 and $299 and a toggle advertising 20 percent off for annual billing. Checked 29 July 2026.
• Proclaim pricing. On Air $269.99, Pro Media $399.99 and Partner Media $999.99 a year, against monthly rates of $26.99, $39.99 and $99.99, with the page’s own “save up to 17% with annual billing” line. Checked 29 July 2026.
• EasyWorship pricing. $17.50 a month billed yearly at $210, higher tier $27.50 and $330. Checked 29 July 2026.
• ProPresenter. No price on the product page or on the front page of the accounts store. Attempted 29 July 2026.
• Tithely pricing. Card 2.9 percent plus 30 cents, American Express 3.5 percent plus 30 cents, ACH 1 percent plus 30 cents. Checked 29 July 2026.
• Subsplash pricing. Giving at $0 a month, card 2.3 percent plus 30 cents, ACH 1 percent, with a savings calculator that benchmarks competitors at 2.9 percent plus 30 cents and 1 percent plus 30 cents. Checked 29 July 2026.
• Independent Sector, value of volunteer time. $36.14 an hour for 2025, announced 21 April 2026 with the Do Good Institute at the University of Maryland. Checked 29 July 2026.
• Faith Communities Today 2020 summary report. Median congregational income $120,000 a year, 85 percent from individual donations, an average of $2,000 per person, median weekly attendance 65.

Nothing here is tax or legal advice, and no vendor in this piece paid for a place in it.