- Starting price
- Free
- Free tier
- Yes
- Platforms
- iOS - Android - Web
- Developer
- Live Church Solutions
- Launched
- 2022
- Updated
- Aug 9, 2026
The verdict
B1 Church is the right first call for a small or mid-sized congregation that cannot fund a per-seat ChMS and has one volunteer willing to own setup - free with no tier above it, public code, and an admin side broader than the price suggests. Churches needing a custom-branded app under their own name in the App Store, an iPad check-in kiosk, or a vendor with a support contract should not standardise on it.
Try B1 Church ↗Opens b1.church
First, a correction. B1 Church is not a Ministry Brands product and has no connection to that group or to Pushpay, Subsplash or Tithe.ly. It is built by Live Church Solutions, a 501(c)(3) registered in Broken Arrow, Oklahoma under EIN 45-5349618, which publishes under the ChurchApps banner alongside Lessons.church, FreeShow and FreePlay. That ownership was verified against the organisation own about page and its IRS filings in August 2026. In a category where the corporate parent changes every eighteen months, B1 is the rare product owned by a donor-funded ministry rather than a roll-up, and that drives almost every finding below.
Second, the thing a reader cannot learn from the store listing. Each church does not get its own separately-listed app. There is exactly one public listing, called B1 Church, and every member of every congregation installs that same binary. On first run a member logs in with a ChurchApps account and then, in the vendor own words, has to "Select your church by searching for it by name. Type at least 3 characters to see results." The interior then adapts to that church branding, and a member who belongs to two churches can switch between them freely. But there is no per-church icon and nothing to announce beyond "search the App Store for B1.church".
Third, the product is free in the strongest sense. B1.church states "$0 per month - for everything, forever", with "No tiers, no trials", and adds that "B1 adds zero fees on donations. You pay only standard Stripe or PayPal processing rates - nothing goes to us." All of it is open source and self-hostable, and there is no paid plan above the free one because there are no limits to outgrow.
Fourth, on whether the product has gone quiet: the store says no and the documentation says yes. Version 3.17.0 shipped on 28 May 2026 with release notes reading "Updated UI", roughly ten weeks before this review - active, not abandoned. But the vendor own mobile documentation opens with a deprecation notice. Both facts are reported below without reconciliation, because they cannot be reconciled from outside.
✓ The good
- Genuinely $0 with no tier above it - B1.church prints "$0 per month - for everything, forever" and "No tiers, no trials", and the admin side ships people, groups, attendance, donations, serving, forms, reports, website, sermons and calendars with no paywall between any of them.
- Zero platform fee on giving - the vendor states "B1 adds zero fees on donations. You pay only standard Stripe or PayPal processing rates - nothing goes to us", removing the per-transaction platform cut most church giving products stack on top of the processor.
- Open source and self-hostable - "All of B1 is open source. Inspect the code, contribute, or self-host - your data is always yours", which is a real exit route and a real answer to lock-in.
- One database rather than a bundle - the vendor describes "One platform on a single database, with nothing sold separately", so attendance, giving and the directory are the same records, not three systems synced nightly.
- A documented Claude and MCP integration - the admin API exposes three tools for endpoint discovery, documentation and authenticated calls, so staff can ask about first-time visitors or donation summaries in plain language, scoped to that person permissions. Revocation is immediate: "Claude loses it on the next call - instantly".
- A nonprofit owner with public books - Live Church Solutions files a Form 990, so a church can read the operating budget before standardising rather than guessing at a private vendor runway.
✗ Watch out
- The native app is officially deprecated - the vendor own docs state "The native B1 Mobile app has been replaced by the B1.church Progressive Web App (PWA)" and tell new users to install the PWA "instead of downloading B1 Mobile from the App Store or Google Play", while the admin docs label it "B1 - Mobile (Deprecated)".
- No custom-branded app - members install one shared listing and search for the church by name with a three-character minimum, so a congregation cannot point people at an app carrying its own name and icon.
- Check-in is Android-tablet only - the support site describes B1 Checkin as a "Self-service check-in kiosk app for Android tablets", so an iPad-standardised church has to buy different hardware.
- English only - the App Store listing declares one supported language, EN, against an organisation claiming churches "around the world" and an admin module recording giving "in multiple currencies".
- Requires iOS 17.0 or later - a high floor for a congregation-facing app, which leaves members on older iPhones in the browser.
- Support is email and community, not contractual - the docs point churches to support@churchapps.org and a volunteer Slack, and no paid support tier or response-time commitment is published.
Best for
- Small and mid-sized churches with no software budget
- Church plants that need a website, app and giving on day one
- Congregations with a technical volunteer to own setup
- Ministries that want an open-source exit route from a paid ChMS
Avoid if
- Churches that need their own branded app listing
- Sites standardised on iPad check-in kiosks
- Non-English congregations needing a localised member app
- Staff teams that require a paid support contract
What B1 Church is
B1 Church is the congregation-facing half of ChurchApps, a free software suite from Live Church Solutions. The member surface is a phone app and a web portal at a church-specific subdomain in the form yourchurch.b1.church; the staff surface is B1 Admin, a browser dashboard. A member signs in and gets a timeline of church updates, their groups and group conversations, giving with a history of past gifts, event registration, self check-in, volunteer positions to sign up for, a searchable directory with member-to-member messaging, and sermon, live-stream and Bible content.
The admin dashboard covers the standard church-management surface: people and household records with bulk editing, groups with join requests, campuses and service times for attendance, multi-currency donations with fund management and giving statements, volunteer coordination and service plans, custom forms, birthday and attendance and donation reports, a website builder, a sermon library with live streaming, curated calendars built from group events, and role-based permissions. It is one database, not a bundle - the vendor is explicit that nothing is sold separately, because nothing is sold at all.
The price is not a promotion, and the books are public
Every other platform in this category has a number attached. Subsplash quotes in the hundreds to thousands per month, Tithe.ly layers paid modules on a free giving base, Planning Center bills per module, and One Church Software starts at $58 per month. B1 has no number, no trial clock, and no plan above the one a church starts on - not a customer-acquisition tactic with a renewal conversation behind it, but a 501(c)(3) giving away its output with the code published so a church can walk away with its own data.
The unusual part is that a church can audit the runway before committing. Live Church Solutions filed for the fiscal year ending December 2025 on 11 May 2026, reporting total revenue of $158,395 against total expenses of $172,366 - a deficit of $13,971. Set that against the ChurchApps claim of "over 15,000 churches around the world" and the platform runs on about $10.56 of revenue per church per year. Read one way, remarkable leverage from volunteer labour. Read another, the entire risk in a sentence: the software is free because the people building it are not paid market rates to build it.
One shared app, and a church picker - not a branded listing
This is the most consequential thing about B1 and it is invisible from the store page. There is one listing, one icon and one app name, and every congregation shares it. A new member logs in with a ChurchApps account, then selects the church by searching its name, typing at least three characters before results appear. Members who attend two churches can hold both and switch freely - a genuine convenience for multi-church families and for staff serving a plant as well as a sending church.
The cost is announceability. A church on Subsplash tells people to search the App Store for the church name and find an icon with its own logo. A church on B1 tells people to search for B1.church, install a product with someone else branding, create an account, then find the church in a list. The vendor states the app "adapted to your church branding and configuration" after selection - so the inside is themed, the store listing and first-run flow are not. Where the app is the primary front door that is a real adoption tax; where the church already communicates by email and pulpit announcement it is a shrug.
What the admin actually gets, against what the member gets
The member app is a connection tool: giving, groups, events, check-in, directory, serving sign-ups, sermons, Bible and verse of the day. The App Store description frames it as integrating "all of the ChurchApps services and external resources into one simple app", and the list is what a congregant expects - give, register, check in, find someone, watch the stream.
The admin dashboard is where the platform earns the church-management label, and it is broader than a free product usually is: household records with bulk edit, campuses and service times, multi-currency donations with funds and giving statements, custom forms, service plans with volunteer assignment, a song library, a website builder, curated calendars, multi-campus reporting and role-based permissions. What it does not publish is an SLA or a migration service, so a church moving off Planning Center does the import itself against the public API.
The Claude and MCP integration, with its caps stated
B1 Admin exposes a Model Context Protocol server so Claude can query church records in plain language - the documented example is asking how many first-time visitors came on Sunday and having the answer read "directly from your church records, scoped to your permissions". Setup needs an admin with the Edit Settings permission to mint an API key prefixed cak_, plus Claude Code, Claude Desktop, or a Claude Pro, Max or Team account.
The caveats are printed rather than buried. A single tool response is capped at 64 KB "so long lists do not blow out Claude context". Webhooks, OAuth admin endpoints and other operator-only paths are blocklisted. Claude.ai custom connectors are unsupported because they require OAuth. For a church weighing whether to let an AI assistant near donation records, that disclosure is worth more than a page of assurance.
Pricing
Free
$0 per month
Everything: the member app, the church website at yourchurch.b1.church, online giving, self check-in, member directory, groups, events, forms, attendance, serving plans, sermons and multi-campus reporting. The site states "No tiers, no trials" and "$0 per month - for everything, forever". Funded by donations - ChurchApps says it is "funded by the generous support of partner churches and individual donors" with volunteer developers, plus GitHub Sponsors.
Online giving
Processor rates only
B1 charges nothing on donations: "B1 adds zero fees on donations. You pay only standard Stripe or PayPal processing rates - nothing goes to us." B1 does not publish what those rates are, so a church prices that leg from the processor own schedule; the Spring 2026 newsletter promotes ACH giving as the way to reduce card processing fees.
SMS texting (Clearstream)
Not published
The Spring 2026 newsletter announces that "ChurchApps now offers texting through our integration with Clearstream, which means you can send SMS messages to your members". Clearstream is a separate commercial provider and ChurchApps publishes no price for it, so church-wide texting is the one common function on this platform that is not demonstrably free.
There is one price and it is zero. B1.church prints "$0 per month - for everything, forever" and "No tiers, no trials", and nothing on the site or in the documentation contradicts it. Both store listings show Free, and neither declares in-app purchases.
The only money that changes hands on giving goes to the processor. B1 states it adds zero fees and that a church pays "only standard Stripe or PayPal processing rates". B1 does not publish those rates, which is defensible - they are not B1 rates - but it means the true cost of running giving on B1 is not knowable from B1 material alone. The Spring 2026 newsletter pushes ACH as the lever for reducing card fees, which is correct advice and an implicit acknowledgement that card rates are the real cost line.
Texting is the one exception to the free story. SMS through Clearstream introduces a third-party commercial dependency, and no price for it appears on the ChurchApps site. Budget church-wide texting as an unpriced line item rather than as included.
The funding side is worth the arithmetic. FY2025 revenue of $158,395 against 15,000-plus claimed churches is roughly $10.56 per church per year. Separately, the newsletter claims "churches on our platform are saving an average of $1,500 per year"; at 15,000 churches that is $22.5 million of claimed annual savings delivered on a $158,395 budget. Both figures come from the vendor and are reported as given, not reconciled - but the value claimed exceeds the operating budget by a factor of about 142.
Where B1 Church falls behind
The deprecation contradiction. The B1 Mobile documentation states that "The native B1 Mobile app has been replaced by the B1.church Progressive Web App (PWA)" and instructs new users to install the PWA "instead of downloading B1 Mobile from the App Store or Google Play", and the admin documentation labels the product "B1 - Mobile (Deprecated)". Then the same page carries a quick-start step reading "Download the app from the App Store (iOS) or Google Play Store (Android). Search for B1.church" - telling a user to do the thing it just told them not to. Meanwhile the App Store shipped version 3.17.0 on 28 May 2026 with the note "Updated UI". That is not a stale app; it is an ambiguous one, which is arguably worse for a church about to tell 300 people to install something.
Adoption is thin, and the numbers do not line up with the marketing. Google Play reports 1,000-plus installs and 7 reviews at 4.7; the App Store shows 6 ratings. Against a claim of "over 15,000 churches around the world" those figures are hard to place - either almost all usage is the web portal and admin dashboard, or the church count counts registrations rather than active congregations. The deprecation notice makes the first reading plausible. Either way, the member app has a four-figure install base.
Platform coverage has specific holes. Check-in runs on Android tablets only, per the support site own description, so an iPad-standardised children ministry cannot use the kiosk. The listing declares English as the sole language while the organisation claims worldwide reach and the donations module handles multiple currencies. The minimum OS is iOS 17.0, and no iPad screenshots are published at all.
Privacy disclosure is thinner than the open-source framing implies. Apple App Privacy lists payment info, email address and name as linked to the user, plus coarse location and diagnostics as not linked. Google Play goes further, disclosing that the app "may share these data types with third parties: Personal info" - which sits awkwardly beside a pitch that includes "your data is always yours". The site does not explain which third parties, or why.
No commercial safety net. Support is support@churchapps.org and a volunteer Slack - no paid tier, no SLA, no account management, no migration service, and a parent that spent $13,971 more than it took in during FY2025. Open-source projects with public code have survival paths a venture-funded vendor does not, but a church standardising 500 households onto free software should plan for the volunteer who maintains its favourite module moving on.
B1 Church vs. Subsplash vs. Tithe.ly vs. Planning Center
The useful axis is bundled suite versus standalone, and B1 sits at the far bundled end. It is not an app you bolt onto a ChMS you already own - the app is the front end of B1 Admin, and using the member app without the ChurchApps back office is not a supported configuration. That is the opposite of how a church usually buys: Subsplash and Tithe.ly both sell an app that can front someone else database, and Planning Center sells modules a church adopts one at a time. B1 asks for the whole stack or nothing, and charges nothing for it.
Subsplash is the direct opposite. It sells fully custom-branded apps under the church own name and icon across phone, web and TV, quoted in the hundreds to thousands per month, and large churches keep choosing it precisely because the branding is bespoke. If the app being unmistakably the church app matters, B1 cannot be argued into the role. Tithe.ly sits in between - free for giving, paid modules from around $59 per month - the realistic upgrade path for a church that starts on B1 and later wants a support desk.
Planning Center is the comparison for the admin side rather than the app side: free to start, then roughly $14 per module per month. A church already paying for Services and Check-Ins will not move to B1 to save money on modules it likes. The B1 case is strongest for the church not paying for anything yet, or paying $58 per month to One Church Software for a broadly comparable feature set.
The bottom line
B1 Church is the most credible free option in church management software, and the price is not a trick - it is a donor-funded nonprofit giving away open-source code with a public Form 990 behind it. For a plant or a small congregation with a capable volunteer, it replaces several hundred dollars a month of tooling with a weekend of setup. Both reasons to hesitate are about the app rather than the platform: members install a shared listing and search for the church by name rather than tapping an icon with the church logo on it, and the vendor own documentation calls the native app deprecated in favour of a web app while the App Store shows a May 2026 update. Ask ChurchApps which surface is supported before you tell a congregation to install anything.
Alternatives to B1 Church
SubsplashThe custom-branded end of the market - the church own name and icon in the App Store, plus Roku, Apple TV and Fire TV apps, quoted from roughly $300 to $2,000-plus per month. The answer to B1 biggest limitation, at the opposite price point.
Tithe.lyFree for giving with paid modules from around $59 per month covering app, website and ChMS. The natural upgrade path for a church that outgrows volunteer support and wants a vendor with a help desk.
Planning CenterModular church management from Carlsbad, shipping since 2006 - free to start, then about $14 per module per month. Buy only the pieces you need, which is the opposite of B1 all-or-nothing single database.
One Church SoftwareA cloud ChMS with contacts, groups, check-in, giving and events plus a shared mobile app, from $58 per month. The closest paid analogue to B1 in shape, including the shared rather than branded app.
FlocknoteChurch communication with a household database attached, built first for Catholic parishes - free under 40 members, then $10 per month at 41 to 50. Narrower than B1 but far simpler to hand to a volunteer.Frequently asked questions
Is B1 Church owned by Ministry Brands?
No. B1.church is built by Live Church Solutions, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit registered in Broken Arrow, Oklahoma under EIN 45-5349618, and published under the ChurchApps brand alongside Lessons.church, FreeShow and FreePlay. That was confirmed against the organisation own about page and its public IRS filings in August 2026. There is no relationship with Ministry Brands, Pushpay, Subsplash or Tithe.ly.
Does my church get its own app in the App Store?
No. There is one shared listing called B1 Church and every congregation installs the same app. A new member logs in with a ChurchApps account, then selects the church by searching its name, typing at least three characters before results appear. The interior themes to the church branding after selection, but the store listing, app name and icon are B1 - not the church. Members who belong to two churches can switch at any time.
What does B1 Church cost, and is it really free?
It is free. B1.church states "$0 per month - for everything, forever" with "No tiers, no trials", and both store listings show Free with no in-app purchases declared. It is funded by donations - ChurchApps says it is "funded by the generous support of partner churches and individual donors", with volunteer developers. On giving, B1 adds no fee and a church pays only Stripe or PayPal standard rates, which B1 does not publish. The one unpriced commercial dependency is SMS texting, via a Clearstream integration announced in Spring 2026.
Is the app still being updated, or has it gone quiet?
The store record says current: version 3.17.0 shipped on 28 May 2026 with release notes reading "Updated UI", roughly ten weeks before this review, and Google Play shows the same date. But the vendor own documentation states that "The native B1 Mobile app has been replaced by the B1.church Progressive Web App (PWA)" and tells new users to install the PWA rather than download from the stores, and the admin docs label the product "B1 - Mobile (Deprecated)". Both facts are published by the vendor and are not reconcilable from outside. Ask support@churchapps.org which surface is supported before rolling anything out.
Can B1 be used as just an app on top of the ChMS we already have?
Not in any documented configuration. The member app is the front end of B1 Admin on a shared single database - the vendor describes "One platform on a single database, with nothing sold separately". That makes B1 a bundled-suite decision, not a standalone app purchase. A church wanting an app over an existing Planning Center or Breeze database should look at Subsplash or Tithe.ly.
Is a free nonprofit platform safe to standardise on?
It depends on the church appetite for owning risk, and both sides are verifiable. The code is open source and self-hostable, so a congregation can take its data and run the software independently if ChurchApps stops. Against that, Live Church Solutions reported revenue of $158,395 and expenses of $172,366 for the fiscal year ending December 2025 - a deficit of $13,971 - and publishes no paid support tier, SLA or migration service. Against a claim of over 15,000 churches that is about $10.56 per church per year. A church moving 500 households onto it needs a named internal owner rather than a vendor phone number.
Sources & further reading
- B1.church official site ↗
- ChurchApps - About and nonprofit status ↗
- ChurchApps Spring 2026 newsletter ↗
- ChurchApps support - B1 Mobile getting started (deprecation notice) ↗
- ChurchApps support - Claude / MCP integration for B1 Admin ↗
- Apple App Store - B1 Church ↗
- Google Play - B1 Church ↗
- ProPublica Nonprofit Explorer - Live Church Solutions (EIN 45-5349618) ↗
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