What Your Church Software Actually Costs — All of It

Ask most church treasurers what they spend on software and you'll get one number — usually whichever subscription is largest. The real figure is spread across four or five line items, several of them on different people's cards, and nobody has added it up in a while.

This page does the addition. It's deliberately written by category rather than by brand: naming vendors would date this within a quarter, and the point isn't which website builder you use, it's how many separate things you're paying for and maintaining.

The typical stack

A congregation of 20–200 running a normal week usually has some version of this:

The money is the smaller half of the problem. The larger half is that none of those tools know about each other.

What fragmentation actually costs

The same person gets entered four times. Once in the member spreadsheet, once in the rota, once in the email list, once in the group chat. Then someone changes their phone number and it's right in one place and wrong in three.

Every handover is a training session. When the volunteer who ran the projection software moves away, their replacement learns a tool nobody else in the church uses. Multiply by five tools and a normal rate of volunteer turnover.

Nobody owns the whole picture. The website says the service starts at 10:30. The calendar tool says 10:00. Both were right once.

Support is in the wrong language. Most of these tools are built for the US market. When something breaks on a Saturday night, help is a documentation page in English and a ticket queue in a different time zone.

What consolidating changes

One login, one bill, one underlying database. Add a member once and they're in your records, eligible for the rota, and able to see their duties. Publish a service plan and the projection playlist is already built. Upload a sermon and it appears on the website archive without a second step.

The honest limits matter here too. Consolidating means accepting that one platform won't be the deepest tool in every category — a dedicated projection application will always have more production features than a browser-based one, and a dedicated scheduling product will have more edge cases covered. The trade is worth making when your constraint is volunteer time rather than feature depth, which for most churches under a few hundred people it is.

Where Ekkli sits

Ekkli covers presentation and live display, the church website, member records, rotas and service plans, groups and forum, events with RSVP, sermon audio, and the congregation app — on one login, priced flat and publicly, in eight languages, with EU data residency and GDPR tooling built in rather than bolted on.

Two things it does genuinely better than an assembled stack, rather than merely as well:

• Offline export. A whole slide set bundles into one self-contained HTML file — fonts, images and all — that runs from a USB stick with no network at all. If your building's connection is unreliable, this removes the single biggest objection to browser-based projection.
• Your own language, all the way through. Interface, support and documentation in eight European languages, with public-domain scripture text bundled per language. Most of this category is English-first with translations added later, if at all.

And two things it doesn't have, which a stack might already give you: children's check-in, and online giving. Both matter to plenty of churches, and if either is load-bearing for you, that's a real reason to keep a separate tool.

Frequently asked questions

Is an all-in-one platform always cheaper?

Not always. If your church already runs on free tiers of general tools and nobody minds the duplication, a stack can cost close to nothing in cash. The saving from consolidating is usually in volunteer hours and error rate rather than the invoice.

What if we only want to replace one tool?

That works. Plenty of churches start with projection alone, or the website alone, and leave the rest in place. The modules can be switched on and off per church.

Do we have to migrate everything at once?

No, and we'd advise against it. Move one thing, run it for a month of real Sundays, then move the next. Six months is long enough to do that properly.

What happens to our existing song library?

If it's in OpenLP or OpenLyrics format it imports directly — see importing your song library. Other formats need re-entry, which is worth knowing before you start.