Clearstream

What Clearstream is

Clearstream is a church texting and email service for mass messaging, two-way conversations, guest follow-up, surveys and ministry segmentation. Churches send and schedule text announcements including links, pictures and video, run text-to-join keywords that trigger automated workflows, and handle one-to-one conversations from a shared texting inbox. Around that sit subaccounts for separate campuses or ministries, custom branded microsites for visitors, giving and volunteering, a link shortener with branded links and click tracking, a free QR code generator, live polls, video texting, social media posting and NFC Tap Tags.

Pricing is a pure credit ladder: eleven published monthly tiers priced by outgoing text credits, with unlimited email free on every plan and all incoming messages free. It runs as a web app with free native iOS and Android apps. Contact and user counts are not restricted by tier - though the company does not actually state that in writing, so it is worth confirming.

Why churches stay with Clearstream

Two reasons, and neither is a feature. The first is the company. Clearstream has been at this since 2010, is owned by the two men who built it, and publishes the fact that it has taken no outside money and carries no debt - which in practice means no acquisition, no repricing to satisfy an investor, and no roadmap driven by anyone but its customers. Since around 2016 it has served churches and nonprofits exclusively; over 10,000 of them, by its own count. Seventeen employees is small, and that cuts both ways, but it is a legible, stable vendor in a category where products get bought and folded into suites with some regularity.

The second is that it fits into whatever you already run. Planning Center, Rock RMS, CCB and Pushpay, Breeze, Slack, Mailchimp, Zapier, Simple Donation, X, Facebook and a public API - a list broad enough that the question stops being "will this work with our church management system" and becomes a matter of which sync you configure. In May 2026 workflows gained the ability to create tasks in Planning Center, which turns an automated text sequence into something that can also put a job in front of a human. Add subaccounts for campuses, unlimited free email on every tier, and free incoming messages, and the platform bends to fit a church's actual structure rather than asking the church to simplify itself.

The credit ladder: how a $29 plan becomes a $99 plan

The counting rules are published plainly and they are the whole pricing model. "One message sent to one person costs 1 credit" for up to "160 standard characters (letters, numbers, spaces, and punctuation)." Above 160 characters it becomes "2 credits per person." A picture message costs "3 credits per person, regardless of how many characters you use." Incoming messages are free and email is free and unlimited on every plan. Monthly credits expire at the end of the cycle; only separately purchased a la carte packets "do not expire." The ladder runs from $29 for 1,250 credits to $5,400 for 500,000, with an annual option at 16% off.

Convert that into a church and the numbers move quickly. A 400-person congregation texting its whole list once a week sends about 4.3 messages a month. Keep every message under 160 characters and that is 1,733 credits - past the $29 tier, comfortable on $49. Write 200 characters instead and the same schedule costs 3,467 credits, which is a $99 plan. Attach a photo and it is 5,200 credits, still $99 but with little room. A 1,000-person church sending one short text a week needs 4,333 credits ($99); make those messages long and it is 8,667 ($199); make them photos and it is 13,000 ($299). The lesson is not that Clearstream is expensive - it is that the character count of your Sunday announcement is a pricing decision, and nobody tells you that at the point of sale.

Short Code Registry Premier Partner: the compliance point nobody asks about

Mass texting in the United States is not an open channel. Application-to-person traffic - which is exactly what a church announcement is - is registered with the mobile carriers, and unregistered or poorly-behaved senders get throttled or filtered rather than rejected with an error you would notice. Clearstream treats this as an explicit part of onboarding: wireless carrier and A2P registration is a documented workflow with its own help articles, sending without "explicit recipient consent" is prohibited, and the terms bar SHAFT content (sex, hate, alcohol, firearms, tobacco) along with several financial-services categories. The company describes itself as a Premier Partner with the Short Code Registry, and short codes are available for high-volume senders, though that pricing is not published.

Why this should matter to a church: the failure mode of bad SMS compliance is silence. Your Sunday-cancellation text does not bounce, it simply does not arrive for some fraction of the list, and you find out on Monday. Two situations make a church vulnerable. The first is importing a legacy directory - numbers collected over fifteen years without documented opt-in are precisely the traffic carriers filter, so Clearstream's consent requirement is not bureaucracy but the thing standing between you and a filtered number. The second is volume: a large church pushing thousands of messages in a few minutes looks like a marketing platform, and whether that traffic is registered properly and routed over an appropriate short code is a provider-side question you cannot fix yourself. A vendor with Premier Partner standing and a published registration workflow is offering something real here - though the terms also disclaim any deliverability warranty, in capitals, so nobody is promising perfection.

Subaccounts, workflows and the 2026 additions

Subaccounts are separate accounts within one subscription for different ministries or campuses, rationed by tier: none on the $29 plan, 2 at $49, 4 at $99, 8 at $199, rising to 35 at the top band, with phone numbers one higher at each step. Workflows let you "schedule a series of texts that send over time," triggered by a text-to-join keyword with an automatic response, and since May 2026 a workflow step can also create a task in Planning Center. April 2026 brought a Voice add-on, extending the platform beyond text and email, though the material reviewed here does not carry its pricing. Around the edges sit branded microsites, a link shortener with click tracking, live polls, video texting and NFC Tap Tags at $1 each ($2 custom) that fire a keyword or microsite on tap.

The subaccount ladder is worth planning around, because it is the one place Clearstream's pricing is driven by something other than volume. A two-campus church with a modest list is pushed to $49 for the separation rather than the credits, and a church running youth, women's ministry, worship team and two campuses as distinct senders is on $99 for structural reasons. That is still cheap for what it does - the alternative at most competitors is shared numbers or a second subscription - but it means you should size your tier on subaccounts and phone numbers first, then check the credits, rather than the other way round.

Pricing

Where Clearstream falls behind

The unit of account is smaller than the competition's. Clearstream counts a credit per recipient every 160 characters; Text In Church counts one message per recipient for up to 459 characters or three segments. So the same 250-character announcement to the same 400 people costs 800 credits here and 400 messages there. That single difference decides most head-to-head price comparisons, and it goes against Clearstream whenever a church writes more than a sentence. Picture messages narrow the gap - three credits versus a doubled message - but for ordinary prose texting, the character ceiling is the thing to check first.

No overage means no safety net. Text In Church charges $0.03 a message past your allotment, which is cheaper than its own tiers. Clearstream has no equivalent: you either buy a bigger plan in advance or buy top-ups at $0.0425 to $0.08 a credit. For a church whose volume is genuinely unpredictable - a bereavement, a weather cancellation, a building crisis, all of which arrive as unplanned all-church texts - that is a real disadvantage, and it means the safe move is to over-buy, which is itself wasteful because credits expire monthly.

The small print is firmer than most. Non-refundable with no credit for partial months. Auto-renewal with a 24-hour cancellation window and no assisted cancellation. Data forfeited on termination, with no published export guarantee. No deliverability warranty - the terms state in capitals that the services are not warranted to "meet your expectations, operate error-free." All of it is disclosed honestly, which is more than some competitors manage, but together it leaves the customer carrying most of the risk.

Some things are simply not published. Contact and subscriber limits are stated nowhere on the homepage, pricing page, how-it-works page or terms - the model implies contacts are unrestricted, but implication is not a commitment, so ask. Short code pricing is absent. And what happens when credits run out mid-send is undocumented, which for a church halfway through an emergency announcement is not a trivial gap.

Follow-up automation is good rather than best-in-class. Workflows can schedule a series of texts over time and, since May 2026, create a Planning Center task, which is a meaningful step. But Text In Church has built its entire product around timed guest-follow-up sequences with wait steps combining texts and emails, fired by digital connect cards, and that remains the deeper implementation of the same idea. If closing the gap between a Sunday visit and a Monday contact is the specific problem you are buying software to solve, this is the one area where Clearstream is not the leader.

Clearstream vs. Text In Church vs. Flocknote

These two are the serious choices in church texting, and the arithmetic - not the feature grid - separates them. Clearstream charges a credit per recipient per 160 characters, two credits above that, three for a picture. Text In Church charges one message per recipient for up to 459 characters, doubled for MMS, with $0.03 overage past the allotment. Take a 400-person church texting weekly: short messages cost $49 on Clearstream versus roughly $63 on Text In Church's Pro tier including overage, so Clearstream wins. Write 250 characters and Clearstream needs the $99 tier while Text In Church still counts one unit per person and stays at about $63, so Text In Church wins comfortably. Send a weekly photo and it is $99 versus about $110, back to Clearstream. Character count decides it, which is an absurd basis for a software purchase and yet is the true one.

Beyond price, they lead in different places. Text In Church has the better guest-follow-up automation and, since early 2025, native availability as an add-on inside Planning Center - if your church already runs Planning Center, that is a strong reason to look there first. Clearstream wins on almost everything structural: eleven tiers up to 500,000 credits against a ceiling of 2,500 texts, subaccounts and phone numbers handed out generously for multi-campus work, a broader integration list covering Rock RMS, Breeze, CCB/Pushpay, Slack and a public API, Premier Partner standing with the Short Code Registry, and a company that publishes its founders, its headcount and its funding position. Text In Church publishes no /about page at all. Both offer unlimited email and free incoming messages; both have a church-plant offer, though Clearstream's free year beats six free months.

Flocknote is the third name most churches consider, at 4.3 on the App Store, with a strong following in Catholic parishes and a simpler proposition. On store signal, Clearstream's 4.9 from 1,375 ratings and Text In Church's 4.8 from 4,789 are the two highest-rated products in our entire church-software set on samples large enough to be meaningful - close enough to each other that the score should not decide anything. Remember too what is being rated: a free companion app your staff use, not the experience your congregation has, since members receive ordinary SMS and email and install nothing. The clean recommendation is this. Choose Clearstream if you are multi-campus, sending real volume, running Rock RMS or Breeze or CCB, or you care about compliance and vendor independence. Choose Text In Church if you live inside Planning Center, write long messages, or your biggest problem is that Sunday's guests never hear from anyone on Monday.

Alternatives to Clearstream

Text In Church★ 4.8The direct rival, at 4.8 from 4,789 ratings. Better guest-follow-up automation, a 459-character message unit that beats Clearstream on long texts, cheap $0.03 overage - and native availability inside Planning Center.→Rock RMS★ 4.4The open-source church management system Clearstream integrates with, rated 4.4. Free to license but demanding to host and maintain - and it pairs naturally with an external texting platform rather than replacing one.→Flocknote★ 4.3The other established church communication tool at 4.3, with a particularly strong following in Catholic parishes. Simpler than Clearstream, and worth comparing on how it counts a message before you commit.→Planning Center★ 3.7The church management system Clearstream integrates with and can now create tasks in from a workflow. A 3.7 store rating, but if your people data already lives here, check what your texting platform does with it.→

More Church Management Software

Subsplash★ 5.0The all-in-one church platform megachurches keep choosing - fully custom-branded apps across phone, web, and TV that make a 5,000-member ministry feel like an Apple keynote.→Givelify★ 4.9The church giving app that won the donor side of the market by treating the person in the pew as the customer - and letting the church benefit from that gravity.→Text In Church★ 4.8A church texting service built around automated guest follow-up, now available as an add-on inside Planning Center - and priced by a monthly text allotment that is counted per recipient, which changes the sum entirely.→ChMeetings★ 4.6A church management platform built for the whole world, not just the United States - and the only serious option with a real free tier for small congregations.→Tithe.ly★ 4.5Tithe.ly has quietly become the default church platform for small and mid-sized congregations - giving, app, website, and ChMS under one login, starting free.→Rock RMS★ 4.4A full church management system and digital ministry platform given away with no licence fee by a 501(c)(3) - and the only question that matters is what it costs to actually run, which is not nothing.→