Subsplash

What Subsplash is

Subsplash is a church technology platform that builds and operates a ministry’s entire digital front door. At its core it is a custom-branded mobile app — your name on the icon, your design language inside — that doubles as a sermon library, a giving portal, an event registration system, and a push-notification channel. Around that core, Subsplash layers a website builder, TV apps for Roku and Apple TV and Fire TV, a media platform with automatic transcription, online and text-to-give donations, and check-in for kids ministry.

Founded in 2005 in Seattle and used today by tens of thousands of churches, schools, and faith organizations, the company sells the bundle as much as it sells any single tool. The pitch is that one vendor with one congregant database, one support team, and one design system can do what most churches currently piece together from five or six separate products — and that the resulting experience for a regular attender is dramatically more cohesive.

Why growing churches choose Subsplash

The single biggest practical difference between Subsplash and the cheaper competition is that Subsplash treats your church as the brand. The app is not a Subsplash app with your logo dropped in a header — it is your app, listed under your ministry’s name in the App Store, with your color system, your typography, and your splash screen. To a congregant downloading it on a Sunday morning, there is no Subsplash branding visible anywhere. That is harder than it sounds and almost no competitor at lower price points actually delivers it.

The second reason mid-to-large churches keep landing here is the breadth of the platform under that branded surface. When the same sermon a guest watches in the app on Sunday afternoon is automatically available on Roku that night, transcribed and searchable on the website by Tuesday, and clipped into a 60-second push notification on Friday — and the giving link inside that sermon ties back to the same congregant record as the kids check-in their family used at 10:30 a.m. — that is an experience a five-tool stack simply cannot produce. Subsplash sells integration, and at scale that integration is what the money is paying for.

Custom-branded apps: the differentiator vs. Tithe.ly

When you sign with Subsplash, you are not getting a slot inside a shared church app. You are getting a fully white-labeled native iOS and Android application — submitted under your church’s developer account (or Subsplash’s, with your name front and center), with your icon on the home screen, your splash, your navigation, and your content. A Subsplash designer works through your brand kit, the engineering team handles all App Store and Google Play submissions and updates, and the result lands in stores looking like a product an in-house team shipped.

This sounds like a small thing. In practice it is transformative. Tithe.ly’s Church App tier (the cheaper competitor) effectively gives every church a version of the same app with their logo at the top — fine for a 75-person plant, but it shows the moment a congregant compares it to anything else on their phone. Subsplash’s deliverable looks like Apple shipped it for you, and for a church investing real budget in digital presence, that gap is the whole reason to be on the platform.

Sermon hosting + multi-screen reach: Roku, Apple TV, Fire TV

Subsplash’s media engine is built for churches that produce more than a Sunday morning livestream. You upload one sermon — video or audio — and the platform handles encoding, hosting, automatic transcription, chapter markers, and distribution to every surface you operate: the mobile app, the website embed, the podcast feed, and crucially the TV apps on Roku, Apple TV, and Fire TV. The transcription is genuinely usable for search and for accessibility, and the player is fast on cellular.

The TV piece is where Subsplash genuinely has no peer at this category. Building, submitting, and maintaining a Roku channel and an Apple TV app is a small engineering project on its own — and Subsplash includes it as a module rather than a separate vendor relationship. For a church whose older congregants watch sermons on a living-room TV, or whose multisite locations want to push the main campus sermon to overflow rooms via a streaming box, this is the feature that closes the deal. Tithe.ly does not really compete here. Pushpay/Resi has Resi for streaming, but it is more broadcast pipeline than congregant-facing TV experience.

Integrated giving + check-in + websites: one congregant, one record

The third pillar is the suite of operational tools that share the same congregant database as the app: online and text-to-give donations, kids check-in (with secure pickup tags and ratio limits), event registration, group sign-ups, and a drag-and-drop website builder. Push notifications, email, and SMS all draw on the same contact list, and giving history, attendance, and engagement live on a single profile that staff can actually use for pastoral follow-up.

The unlock is not any one of these tools individually — Planning Center does check-in better, Tithe.ly Giving is arguably faster to set up, and Squarespace makes prettier websites. The unlock is that they all share one record. A first-time visitor who checks a kid in, gives $50, and registers for the next Alpha course shows up as one person on one screen, and a pastor can call that family on Monday with the whole picture. That is the operational reason churches consolidate onto Subsplash even when they liked their old individual tools.

Pricing

Where Subsplash falls behind

No public pricing. You cannot evaluate Subsplash on a Tuesday afternoon without a sales call, and that alone disqualifies it for plenty of pastors who just want a number. Tithe.ly publishes its prices and wins a lot of deals on transparency alone.

Not built for small churches. A 75-person plant trying to make the numbers work on Subsplash is going to feel the gap between what they’re paying and what they’re actually using. The platform shines starting around 200 attendees and really earns its keep north of 500.

Self-service ceiling. The platform is powerful but the dashboard is not minimal, and most churches lean on Subsplash’s onboarding team to set things up rather than doing it themselves. If your culture is "we figure it out on a Saturday," this is more vendor-heavy than you may want.

App Store submission control. Updates to your branded app go through Subsplash’s release pipeline, which is fine 95% of the time and frustrating the other 5%. Churches with an in-house dev team sometimes find this constraint chafes.

Module sprawl. The "everything is a module" pricing model can creep — what looks like a $500/mo platform becomes a $1,100/mo platform once you add giving, websites, and TV. It is worth pricing the full bundle you actually want up front.

Subsplash vs. Tithe.ly vs. Pushpay

These are the three names that come up in almost every church-platform shortlist, and they sit at meaningfully different price points and audiences. Different strengths. Subsplash is the premium end-to-end platform — branded apps, TV apps, media, websites, giving, and check-in all in one place, priced for mid-to-large churches. Tithe.ly is the value play — strong giving product, an inexpensive Church App tier, transparent pricing, easy self-serve setup, built for small-to-medium churches that mostly need giving and a basic app. Pushpay is the enterprise generosity specialist — historically the giving platform of choice for megachurches, now bundled with Resi (streaming) and Church Community Builder (ChMS) under the same parent company.

For a church under 250 attendees, Tithe.ly usually wins on cost and simplicity. For a church between 250 and 1,000 that wants a polished, branded experience without building it themselves, Subsplash is the most common landing spot. For a megachurch whose giving strategy is the center of gravity — capital campaigns, recurring giving optimization, donor analytics — Pushpay has the deepest generosity tooling and the integrations to back it up, though its app experience is increasingly catching up rather than leading.

The honest summary: Tithe.ly is broader in pricing reach (free tier exists). Subsplash is better at the branded app and the TV apps. Pushpay is better at high-end generosity tooling and the ChMS integration via CCB. Most growing churches end up either Tithe.ly-then-Subsplash as they scale, or Subsplash-or-Pushpay once they’re past 1,000 attendees and the decision becomes "which all-in-one do we trust."

Alternatives to Subsplash