- Starting price
- Free
- Free tier
- Yes
- Platforms
- Web · Hosted pages · Website embeds · Email
- Developer
- FrontDoor
- Launched
- 2021
- Updated
- Aug 9, 2026
The verdict
FrontDoor removes cost and much of the technical work from a useful outreach pattern: offer an honestly described resource, collect a person’s requested contact details with clear consent, deliver it, and provide measured follow-up. The current product says every feature is free, but its public privacy and terms documents are too brief for the visitor profiles, campaign activity, uploaded content, email delivery, and potentially sensitive faith-interest signals it handles. Use a transparent church identity, one explicit subscription choice, minimal fields, reviewed resources, a short sequence, easy unsubscribe, and routine deletion; do not turn grief, parenting stress, anxiety, or money trouble into covert lead scoring.
Try FrontDoor ↗Opens frontdoor.church
FrontDoor is a church-specific visitor engagement and outreach system. A team selects a ready-made resource or uploads its own, places it behind a branded hosted landing page, shares the page by link or QR code, or embeds a signup widget on the church website. When someone submits the form, the contact appears in a connections dashboard and can enter an automated welcome or discipleship email sequence. Team accounts and role-based permissions support shared work, while analytics show campaign response. It is closer to a small church-focused lead-magnet and email platform than to a full church management system.
The proposition is unusually generous in August 2026. The homepage says FrontDoor is completely free for churches, with no card, paid tier, or hidden cost. It describes unlimited campaigns, connections, and follow-up emails along with the resource library, custom sequences, church branding, analytics, templates, embeds, QR sharing, and a custom subdomain. Older sales paths now resolve to the current free product, so the live offer—not historical lifetime or premium pricing—is the appropriate basis today. A free operating model can change, however, and the terms permit features to change over time without publishing a continuity, export, or shutdown promise.
The strategy begins before a Sunday visit. Current resource examples address a racing mind, messages children need, feeling known, habits of happily married couples, Proverbs, and family activities. A church can meet a practical concern, earn attention through something useful, and then invite a next step. That is legitimate when the sender, purpose, exchange, and follow-up are plain. It becomes ethically fraught when a vulnerable concern is merely the pretext for capturing an email, the church identity is hidden, a download silently enrolls someone in marketing, or behavioral data is treated as pastoral knowledge the person never knowingly shared.
We reviewed the live homepage, About page, training page, pricing claims, workflow, current privacy policy and terms dated June 1, 2026, public resource examples, and accessible marketing pages on August 9, 2026. We did not create a production account, import contacts, inspect the full resource library, send mail, measure deliverability, test forms, validate custom domains, exercise every permission, request support, audit content, inspect source code or vendors, test accessibility, submit deletion, or perform legal, privacy, security, or theological review. Product quantities and limits beyond the explicit unlimited claims were not independently load-tested.
✓ The good
- Actually free today - the current site states $0, no card, no paid tiers, and no hidden costs rather than advertising a narrow temporary trial
- Coherent end-to-end workflow - resource, landing page, form, delivery, sequence, contact record, and analytics live in one church-oriented process
- Low technical barrier - hosted pages, templates, QR links, website embeds, and a custom subdomain let a small team launch without assembling several services
- Useful content starting point - ready-made resources can shorten production time while uploads preserve a church’s ability to create and review its own material
- Follow-up can be timely - a requested download can receive an immediate delivery message and a planned invitation without relying on staff memory
- Team and role support - shared access with role-based permissions is better than circulating one password among staff and volunteers
- Current core documents - both privacy and terms carry a June 1, 2026 update and the privacy page expressly says personal information is not sold
- No forced enterprise conversation - public signup and free pricing are more accessible than church tools that hide all costs behind a sales call
✗ Watch out
- Privacy detail is too thin - the policy names broad identity, church, device, usage, and billing categories but not fields, processors, retention, deletion timing, regions, or legal roles
- Sensitive inferences go unaddressed - downloading a faith, marriage, grief, parenting, anxiety, or money resource can reveal more than an ordinary marketing click
- Email consent mechanics are undocumented - public pages do not explain double opt-in, transactional versus promotional mail, suppression lists, age controls, lawful basis, or complaint handling
- No public security package - there is no visible DPA, subprocessor list, encryption specification, MFA documentation, audit log, incident notice term, backup target, or independent assurance
- Content quality is not demonstrated - a resource library and prewritten sequences still require pastoral, theological, medical, legal, accessibility, and copyright review item by item
- Terms are unusually spare - no clear service-level, export, termination data-return, dispute, indemnity, confidentiality, church/member relationship, or detailed license framework is public
- Free creates continuity questions - the site does not explain funding, sustainable email volume, abuse prevention, future pricing protection, migration, or what happens if service ends
- Analytics boundaries are unclear - campaign response can help stewardship, but undisclosed tracking or informal vulnerability scoring would undermine trust
Best for
- Small churches launching a transparent resource-download and short welcome sequence without a software budget
- Communication teams that will review every resource, form, consent statement, email, field, and retention rule before publishing
- Churches needing a hosted campaign page, QR code, embedded form, and contact handoff in one simple system
- Time-boxed outreach pilots using minimal data, a named owner, a defined pastoral next step, and measured deletion
- Teams willing to keep the church identity and purpose obvious instead of imitating a neutral consumer-content brand
Avoid if
- Your organization requires a signed DPA, security review, subprocessor inventory, SSO, audit logs, SLA, data-region choice, or formal procurement evidence
- You intend to collect counseling details, medical or financial disclosures, children’s information, safeguarding reports, or confidential prayer requests
- A download will silently subscribe the visitor to indefinite marketing or feed an engagement score the person cannot see or contest
- You need a full ChMS, mass texting, event registration, giving, check-in, pastoral case management, or multichannel automation platform
- Your team cannot assign an owner to content review, reply monitoring, unsubscribe handling, access review, exports, and routine deletion
What FrontDoor is
FrontDoor is a lightweight campaign and relationship-acquisition layer built for churches. It combines a resource library, uploaded assets, branded landing pages, embeddable forms, QR distribution, automated email sequences, a connections dashboard, collaboration, permissions, and analytics. The principal record is a person who requested something through a campaign, not a complete household, attendance, giving, volunteer, event, or care history.
It is not a full church management system, counseling record, child-safety system, marketing consent attorney, content publisher of record, or substitute for human pastoral care. A landing page can begin a relationship; it cannot establish the visitor’s needs, beliefs, safety, age, or desire for personal contact. Keep the workflow narrow enough that each automated step still matches what the person reasonably expected when submitting the form.
Why small churches consider FrontDoor: the whole first-contact funnel costs nothing
A common outreach campaign otherwise needs a designer, PDF host, landing-page builder, form, contact database, email automation, QR tool, analytics, permissions, and integrations. FrontDoor packages that chain around church language and makes the current feature set free. A small congregation can test one helpful resource and one follow-up path without an annual contract or a fragile collection of volunteer-owned accounts.
The best implementation makes the exchange unmistakable: “Grace Church will email this guide immediately and send two optional follow-up messages; unsubscribe anytime.” Show the church name, physical and web contact, why each field is needed, a direct privacy link, the resource’s author and review date, and whether a pastor will see the response. Use email only unless another channel receives separate consent. A useful resource should remain useful even if the recipient never attends, donates, or replies.
Resource campaigns and landing pages: serve a real need without disguising the invitation
A team chooses library content or uploads a resource, adds church branding, builds a hosted page, and shares it through a normal link, custom subdomain, QR code, or website placement. That reduces coordination and gives each outreach theme a dedicated page. The practical subjects shown publicly can reach people who are not yet looking for a service time, and a church can adapt the format to a neighborhood guide, Bible reading introduction, family practice, grief resource, or event follow-up.
Review is non-negotiable. Name the author, sources, edition date, church, intended audience, and limitations. Medical, mental-health, abuse, financial, legal, and crisis material should direct readers to qualified help and emergency pathways; devotional encouragement must not promise outcomes or blame suffering. Confirm image and text licenses, accessible structure, readable PDF tagging, mobile layout, translation quality, and safe printing. Do not use an emotionally charged title merely to maximize conversions.
Forms, contacts, and analytics: collect less than the platform permits
Campaign forms create connection records and the dashboard lets a team see who responded. Analytics can compare page visits or conversions and reveal where a form is confusing. Role-based permissions should allow a communication volunteer to manage pages without necessarily receiving broad access to every contact. Those are appropriate mechanics when fields are limited to delivery and an explicitly requested next step.
A resource choice may reveal concern about marriage, anxiety, grief, parenting, money, pornography, faith, or another sensitive subject. Do not expose the topic in email subject lines, broad staff notifications, exports, or casual notes. Avoid free-text disclosures; never treat a download as diagnosis. Document who can view a record, remove departed volunteers immediately, review access quarterly, set a short inactivity deletion period, and allow a recipient to request access, correction, export, and deletion through a real human contact.
Automated follow-up: consistency helps only when expectation and pastoral judgment stay intact
FrontDoor can deliver the requested resource and begin a welcome or discipleship sequence. Automation prevents a promising contact from sitting unnoticed, standardizes basic information, and gives a team time to write clear messages once rather than improvising each reply. The training library also covers campaign planning, email sequences, and maintainable communication systems, which acknowledges that software alone is not the strategy.
Separate service mail from marketing. Send the resource immediately, then follow with only the messages described at signup. Identify the church and a monitored reply address, include an obvious unsubscribe in every optional message, suppress promptly across every campaign, cap frequency across overlapping sequences, and stop automation when a personal pastoral conversation begins. High-risk replies—harm, abuse, suicide, violence, child safety, or urgent need—require a documented human escalation path, not another scheduled email.
Pricing
FrontDoor platform
Free
The current site says all churches receive campaigns, hosted and embedded collection, resource access, connections, follow-up emails, branding, analytics, templates, and team tools with no card or paid tier.
Hosted campaigns
Included
Publish branded landing pages on the service, use a custom subdomain, and share links or QR codes. Confirm domain setup, accessibility, cookie behavior, and export before launch.
Website embeds
Included
Place signup widgets, popups, or related calls to action on a church site. The church must reconcile the embedded form and tracking with its own privacy and cookie notice.
Automated email
Included
Resource delivery and custom welcome or discipleship sequences are included. Verify sender authentication, consent records, bounce handling, unsubscribe behavior, limits, and suppression export.
Church operating cost
Staff time + review
Software is free; writing, content validation, design, pastoral response, privacy review, deliverability, record hygiene, and timely replies are not.
FrontDoor’s current public offer is unusually simple: completely free, without a credit card, paid tiers, or hidden costs. The homepage includes the central product workflow rather than reserving meaningful automation for an upgrade.
Confirm the promise in your own account before investing in a large migration. Ask whether sending, storage, domains, users, campaigns, contacts, uploads, exports, and support have fair-use or technical limits even when the commercial tier is unlimited.
Free does not eliminate switching cost. Preserve originals of every resource and sequence, maintain a periodic contact and consent export, record suppression data securely, and ensure a church-controlled domain and reply mailbox survive a vendor change.
Budget for governance. A staff owner should review content, permissions, replies, unsubscribes, bounces, complaints, inactive records, and results. Legal and privacy review may be appropriate even when the invoice is zero.
Do not pay for “free” with unnecessary visitor data. The durable value is a respectful relationship, not the largest possible list or the most detailed profile.
Where FrontDoor falls behind
Expand the privacy policy into a product data map covering church administrators, visitors, campaign responses, uploaded content, emails, device data, analytics, cookies, payment remnants, legal bases, retention, deletion, transfers, and every processor.
Publish a DPA, subprocessor list, security page, encryption and key practices, MFA status, role matrix, audit-log behavior, vulnerability reporting, incident-notice commitment, backup targets, and independent assurance.
Document email compliance end to end: consent evidence, double opt-in options, transactional classification, sender authentication, deliverability, bounces, complaints, suppression, global unsubscribe, age controls, and data portability.
Give churches configurable retention and automatic deletion, bulk export, consent timestamps and wording, field-level control, access logs, per-campaign purpose, and a verified deletion cascade through delivery vendors and backups.
Publish resource-level authorship, sources, theological/editorial review, date, audience, license, version history, corrections, accessibility, translations, and high-risk-topic safeguards.
Clarify the sustainable free model, continuity plan, future-pricing notice, data-return window, shutdown process, support expectations, service availability, and fair-use limits.
Strengthen terms for confidentiality, customer data, visitor rights, acceptable content, copyright complaints, termination, export, deletion, governing law, dispute, organizational authority, and responsibilities between FrontDoor and each church.
FrontDoor vs. Mailchimp vs. Planning Center People vs. a simple church form
FrontDoor has the clearest church-first path from resource to landing page, connection, and sequence, and its present $0 price is hard to beat. Mailchimp offers deeper email operations, templates, reporting, compliance tooling, and a mature commercial model, but pricing and list complexity grow and it is not pastoral software. Planning Center People keeps contacts closer to a church’s system of record and supports lists and workflows, while resource hosting and campaign pages need another layer. A normal church form plus one manual reply minimizes processors and automation but depends on disciplined staff ownership.
Choose by the smallest responsible data flow. If one guide and two emails are enough, FrontDoor can be an excellent pilot. If consent, segmentation, deliverability, integrations, and reporting are complex, a mature email platform may justify its cost. If respondents already belong in Planning Center, avoid creating an ungoverned shadow database. Whatever the stack, submit as a visitor, inspect every message and header, unsubscribe, request deletion, revoke a volunteer, export the record, and confirm the resource remains accessible and honest.
The bottom line
FrontDoor makes a credible and generous case that budget should not keep a small church from welcoming digital visitors well. A resource campaign, hosted page, embed, QR code, connections dashboard, team permissions, analytics, and email sequence for $0 can replace a surprising amount of technical assembly. The limiting factor is trust, not features. A person asking for help with a restless mind, family, marriage, grief, finances, or faith is not merely a conversion event. The brief June 2026 policy and terms do not yet provide the governance evidence that sensitive church outreach deserves. Start with one low-risk resource, a conspicuous church identity, two necessary fields, a plainly optional short sequence, an easy unsubscribe, narrow staff access, human reply ownership, periodic export, and automatic deletion. Used that way, FrontDoor can open a respectful conversation without turning a felt need into a hidden marketing bargain.
Alternatives to FrontDoor
Text In ChurchA mature paid church communication and follow-up platform with texting, email, workflows, integrations, and a much broader operating footprint.
FlocknoteChurch-oriented email and texting with groups, signup, analytics, and established adoption; compare pricing and member-data governance.
Planning CenterA broader church operations suite whose People lists and workflows may keep follow-up closer to the main congregational record.MailchimpA general-purpose email and landing-page platform with mature delivery and compliance tooling but less church-specific guidance.Church website form + personal emailThe lowest-complexity option for small volume when one accountable person can deliver and follow up promptly without a new database.Frequently asked questions
Is FrontDoor really free for churches?
The current homepage says completely free, with no credit card, paid tiers, or hidden costs, and includes campaigns, landing pages, resources, embeds, connections, sequences, team tools, and analytics. Confirm any technical or fair-use limits in your account.
What does FrontDoor replace?
For a simple resource campaign it can replace separate landing-page, form, file-delivery, QR, contact-list, and basic email-sequence tools. It does not replace a full ChMS, counseling system, event platform, texting service, or pastoral-care process.
Does FrontDoor sell personal information?
Its privacy policy updated June 1, 2026 says it does not sell personal information. The document still needs more detail about processors, fields, cookies, retention, deletion, transfers, and church-versus-vendor responsibilities.
Can a resource download automatically start email follow-up?
Yes, automated welcome and discipleship sequences are a central feature. The form should say exactly what will follow, distinguish delivery from optional marketing, record consent, and provide an easy unsubscribe.
Are FrontDoor resources safe to publish unchanged?
Do not assume so. Review authorship, sources, theology, copyright, accessibility, audience, and advice. High-risk health, grief, abuse, mental-health, finance, and child topics need qualified help pathways and careful limitations.
What data should a church collect?
Usually only an email address and perhaps a name for delivery and the disclosed follow-up. Avoid birthdays, family details, diagnoses, prayer narratives, children’s data, financial information, or open-ended vulnerability unless a separate protected process truly requires them.
How should a church pilot FrontDoor?
Use one low-risk resource and short sequence, test the full visitor experience, authenticate the church sender, limit staff access, monitor replies, export records, test unsubscribe and deletion, review results after 30–60 days, and delete inactive data.
Sources & further reading
More Church Management Software
B1 ChurchA genuinely free, open-source church platform - app, website, giving and check-in on one database - run by an Oklahoma nonprofit. The catch is not the price - it is that the vendor own docs call the native app deprecated.
Involv Chat (church.chat)Involv Chat combines ministry-team messaging, rosters, blocked dates and service scheduling in a focused church workspace—useful when leaders protect volunteer consent and resist turning attendance or gifts data into a spiritual score.
ChurchSoftwareChurchSoftware—formerly StoreHouse—offers an unusually broad church-management core for $0, including giving, check-in, accounting and a shared mobile app, while charging transparently for vendor-heavy extras.
Pastor Notes AppA two-app system that lets leaders publish sermon notes and invite live congregational response while attendees use the free Bible Notes companion—but its pricing math, refund terms and app privacy disclosures need correction before a church commits.
Take RootA low-cost, offline-friendly relationship tracker built specifically for evangelism and discipleship follow-up—more intentional than a spreadsheet, but its old generic privacy policy does not adequately describe the sensitive ministry data the product exists to hold.
Develop.MeDevelop.Me packages course building, cohorts, discussion, assignments, gamification and mobile learning for churches and mission-driven organizations—with unlimited learners on paid plans, but a vague free tier and a 2022 website privacy notice leave procurement questions open.