- Starting price
- Free 14-day trial, then $29/month billed annually
- Free tier
- No
- Platforms
- Web - iOS - Android (branded app on the $199 plan only)
- Developer
- Paul Cox / The Church Co
- Launched
- 2015
- Updated
- Aug 5, 2026
The verdict
Buy The Church Co if you want a designed church website built for you, hosted for $29 a month, with giving that settles into an account your church owns. It is the cheapest credible published price in the category and the only one here where the church holds the Stripe relationship - so it can absorb fees, pass them to givers, or apply to Stripe for a nonprofit rate. Skip it if you need the branded app without jumping to $199, if you need a published bank transfer rate, or if you want a contractual export path: the terms say your content is yours but never say how you get it out.
Try The Church Co ↗Opens thechurchco.com
The Church Co sells one thing under two headlines. The first is that it will design and build your church website for nothing - the vendor's own designers do the work, and the free build is what the whole funnel points at. The second is the price of keeping it: $29 a month, billed annually.
There are four published tiers - Basic $29, Premium $49, Ultimate $199 and a Google Ads plan at $499 - and every one is printed as a per-month figure billed annually. There is no month-to-month price anywhere and no billing toggle. Basic is deliberately thin: hosting, unlimited pages and blogs, a sermon and media library, an events manager. That is four features. Giving, forms, SEO, livestream, the members portal, small groups, sermon notes and the Planning Center and Pushpay integrations begin at Premium; the branded app begins at Ultimate.
The Apple listing attached to this product needs a note first. Apple ID 1598474081, The Church Co App, is published under the seller name Paul Cox and carries the copyright line The Church Co Demo 2021. It is the vendor's demonstration build, last updated July 2024, and Apple shows no average because the vote count is zero. A church on the Ultimate plan gets its own separately listed app under its own name, so the demo tells you nothing about what congregations experience, and the rating here is editorial for that reason.
The interesting part is not the website builder, which does what hosted church builders do. It is the giving architecture. The Church Co does not process payments: its help centre walks the church through creating its own Stripe account and pasting its own publishable and secret API keys into the dashboard, so the money lands in an account the church owns. That is what separates this product from most of its competitors, and it is where the comparison below spends its time.
✓ The good
- The build is genuinely free, not a discount - the vendor's designers construct the site on its platform at no design charge, and the only cost is the subscription that hosts it. The trade is a one-year commitment, stated in the terms.
- $29 a month is the lowest credible published entry price here - $348 a year for hosting, unlimited pages, unlimited blogs, storage, a sermon and media library and the events manager, with no per-page or per-seat metering printed.
- Giving runs on the church's own Stripe account - the help centre has the church generate and paste its own Stripe API keys, so gifts settle into an account the church owns and can audit independently. If the relationship ends, the payment rail does not.
- The church chooses who absorbs the fee - the giving page offers to let members opt in to covering processing fees so the church gets 100 percent of the gift, and because the church is the Stripe merchant it can equally leave the fee on its own side. Both directions are available.
- The church owns the app store listings - the app page requires the church to hold its own Apple App Store and Google Play developer accounts, so the branded app is published under the church's developer identity rather than the vendor's.
✗ Watch out
- The branded app is a $199 plan, not an add-on - the app page says it is not available on basic or premium plans because you need the on-demand team in order to custom code the app. Premium to Ultimate is $588 a year to $2,388, purely to reach the app stores.
- Giving is called a Free Tool but sits behind the $49 tier - the giving page is headed A Free Tool from The Church Co, while the plan comparison lists Secure Online Giving as a Premium feature absent from Basic. Both statements are the vendor's own.
- One approximate processing figure, and nothing else - the giving page says standard Stripe giving fees apply, typically 2.9 percent, and links to stripe.com. No fixed per-transaction amount, no ACH or bank transfer rate and no payout timing is published.
- No published monthly-billing price - all four tiers read per month billed annually, so a church wanting to pay month to month has no printed number, and the free build adds a one-year minimum on top.
- Nothing is refundable - the terms allow cancellation at any time but leave refunds to the vendor's sole discretion, and churches taking the free setup must stay a minimum of one year or be charged for the remainder.
- No export clause - the terms affirm your content is your content and you still own it when you upload it, but describe no way to retrieve pages, sermons, media or giving history, while granting the vendor perpetual, worldwide, free-of-charge use of your site for marketing.
Best for
- Small churches with no volunteer web team
- Congregations that want to own their own Stripe account
- Churches replacing an abandoned WordPress or Wix site
- Treasurers who insist on controlling fee absorption
Avoid if
- A branded mobile app is non-negotiable on a small budget
- You need a published ACH or bank transfer rate
- You want a contractual data export path
- You need check-in, accounting or a full people database
What The Church Co is
The Church Co is a hosted platform for a church's public website, its member-facing tools and its online giving, with an optional branded mobile app that mirrors the site. The website side covers unlimited pages and blogs, a sermon and media library with podcast distribution, an events manager, an instant redesign function and built-in SEO. The engagement side covers a members portal, small groups, sermon notes, a digital prayer wall, live chat rooms, forms and a livestream interface the vendor calls Church Online.
Giving is built in from the Premium tier and powered by Stripe using credentials the church supplies. Integrations are published for Planning Center, Pushpay, Tithe.ly, Church Community Builder and Church Suite, which tells you what the product is not: no check-in, no attendance, no accounting, no full people database. The Church Co is the public front end and the giving form, and expects a church management system behind it.
The church holds the Stripe keys
Most platforms in this category are the merchant: the gift passes through the vendor, the vendor sets the rate, the church receives a payout. The Church Co does not work that way. Its help centre instructs the church to create its own Stripe account, verify it - noting that a valid business number is required to activate it - then copy the publishable and secret keys into The Church Co settings. From that moment the church is the merchant of record, and the vendor publishes no percentage of its own.
Three consequences follow. The church decides whether the fee comes out of the gift or is added to it, because member opt-in fee coverage is offered and the Stripe settings are the church's. The church can email Stripe directly for the nonprofit reduced rate the help centre points to. And if the church leaves, the Stripe account, its history and its donor payment methods stay with the church. The published rate - typically 2.9 percent - is worse than the best in the category. What the church gets in exchange is standing.
Giving on your own merchant account
Giving appears first on the $49 Premium plan and is Stripe-powered end to end. Donors can give once or set up monthly recurring gifts, and the giving page offers to let members opt in to covering processing fees so the church receives 100 percent of the gift. The published cost is one sentence: standard Stripe giving fees apply, typically 2.9 percent, with a link to stripe.com for the rest.
That thinness cuts both ways. A church cannot price its giving from the vendor's page alone - it has to go to Stripe's schedule and, if it qualifies, apply for the nonprofit discount the help centre mentions. But no platform percentage is stacked on top, and nothing about the rate is locked by the subscription. Any improvement the church negotiates with Stripe is the church's to keep.
The free build, and the year it costs
The vendor's designers build the site rather than handing over a template, and the setup work is a separate one-time line on the plan page. There are four packages: Simple, free but requiring a 1 Year Contract; Essentials at $299; Tailored at $799; and Custom at $999, each rising in page count and rounds of revision, and each marked No Contract except the free one. A 14-day trial sits above them.
The trade for the free tier is in the terms: a church accepting free setup must stay a minimum of one year on a paid service, and cancelling early means being charged for the remainder. The paid packages carry no contract. So $299 for Essentials is not only a faster, larger build - it is the price of not being locked in.
The branded app, and why it costs $199
The app mirrors the website rather than duplicating work: sermons and sermon notes, events, prayer requests, giving, connect groups, livestream, forms and church management integrations, all syncing automatically when the dashboard updates. The church must hold its own Apple App Store and Google Play developer accounts; with those in place the vendor says the app can be ready in about 2 weeks, or about a month if they have to be created.
The catch is the tier. The app page states it is not available on basic or premium plans because the on-demand team is required to custom code it, and the plan comparison shows Custom Mobile App only at Ultimate and above. A church wanting the app pays $199 a month rather than $49 - $2,388 a year instead of $588 - and receives the full done-for-you services bundle whether it wants a content management team or not.
Pricing
Basic
$29/month billed annually
Described on the plan page as a basic website: free hosting, unlimited pages, blogs and storage, a sermon and media library, and the events manager. Four features and no more - online giving, forms, SEO, livestream, the members portal, small groups and every integration are excluded. $29 x 12 is $348 a year, and this is the plan the $29 headline refers to.
Premium
$49/month billed annually
For churches needing a website. Adds Secure Online Giving, forms, built-in SEO, Church Online, the livestream interface, the members portal, the digital prayer wall, small groups, sermon notes, live chat rooms, People and Members, Instant Redesign, and the Planning Center and Pushpay integrations. $49 x 12 is $588 a year. The first plan that can take money.
Ultimate
$199/month billed annually
Marked Best Value on the plan page. Adds the Custom Mobile App plus a web design team, content management team, web strategist, app strategist, unlimited revisions and design requests, a website assistant, a sermon upload assistant and AI sermon transcription. $199 x 12 is $2,388 a year. The app cannot be bought separately - the vendor says the on-demand team is what codes it.
Google Ads
$499/month billed annually
Everything in Ultimate plus management of the Google Ad Grant: $10,000 in ad spend from Google for free, ad creation, campaign monitoring and monthly reports. $499 x 12 is $5,988 a year against $10,000 of granted spend the church never pays for. It sits $300 a month above Ultimate, so the question is whether managed grant advertising is worth $3,600 a year.
The published ladder is $29, $49, $199 and $499 a month, each written as per month billed annually - $348, $588, $2,388 and $5,988 a year, with a 14-day free trial. The jump that matters is Premium to Ultimate: a four-fold increase whose only named product feature is the Custom Mobile App, the rest of the increment being staff time.
Setup is a separate one-time line: free for Simple, or $299, $799 and $999. The free option is marked 1 Year Contract and carries a one-year minimum under the terms; the paid packages are marked No Contract, so buying setup is also buying the right to leave.
Transaction costs sit outside the subscription and are not set by the vendor. The only figure published is standard Stripe giving fees apply, typically 2.9 percent. On $250,000 of annual card gifts that is $7,250 - more than twelve times the $588 Premium subscription carrying it, which is why the fee schedule deserves more scrutiny than the plan price. Nothing is refundable: the terms allow cancellation at any time but leave refunds to the vendor's sole discretion, billing renews automatically until cancelled, and fees may change at any time with notice. Use the 14 days.
Where The Church Co falls behind
The fee disclosure is one approximate sentence. Typically 2.9 percent, with a link to Stripe, is everything a church can learn about transaction costs from the giving page. No fixed per-transaction amount, no ACH or bank transfer rate, no international card rate, no payout timing. Competitors that publish a full schedule are easier to budget against even when their numbers are worse, and a church comparing quotes has to reconstruct this one from Stripe's own pricing page.
The terms describe ownership without describing exit. Your content is your content, and you still own it when you upload it to The Church Co, is a clear sentence. What follows it is silence - no export tooling, format or obligation. The same document grants perpetual, worldwide, free-of-charge use of your site for the vendor's marketing and reserves the right to suspend or terminate the service at any time without notice. The Stripe account and the app store listings genuinely do stay with the church, which is more than most hosted builders offer, but the site itself has no printed way out.
It is not a church management system and does not pretend to be. Nothing in the plan comparison covers check-in, attendance, accounting or a full people database beyond a People and Members module, and the answer the vendor offers is integrations - Planning Center, Pushpay, Tithe.ly, Church Community Builder and Church Suite. Which means most churches on this platform are running and paying for two systems, and the $49 Premium plan is the front half of a stack rather than the whole thing.
The Church Co vs. Nucleus vs. Subsplash and Tithe.ly
Nucleus is the closest direct competitor and the comparison is unusually clean: both are website-first with giving attached, and both publish real numbers. Nucleus is $99 a month for the website plus $49 for Giving - $148 list, or $133.20 with its stated 10 percent add-on discount, so $1,598.40 to $1,776 a year. The Church Co's Premium tier includes giving at $49 a month, $588 a year. On subscription alone The Church Co is roughly a third of the price for the same job, plus a free build Nucleus does not offer.
Then the fees invert it. Nucleus charges 1.9 percent on cards with no fixed fee and a flat 25 cents on bank transfers; The Church Co passes through Stripe at typically 2.9 percent with no published bank rate. On $250,000 of card gifts that is $4,750 against $7,250 - a $2,500 gap that dwarfs the $1,010 to $1,188 subscription saving. But the decisive difference is who absorbs it. Nucleus's help centre states that the platform is not set up in a way that would allow a church to pay the fees instead of donors: the 1.9 percent is added on top and the giver pays, always. The Church Co does the opposite - it offers member opt-in fee coverage, and because the church holds the Stripe keys it can simply eat the fee instead. So Nucleus's cheaper rate never reaches the general fund, while The Church Co's dearer rate is the church's to place. A church committed to giving being free at the point of use can implement that here and cannot implement it on Nucleus at any price; a church happy for donors to cover fees should take the 1.9 percent.
Against Subsplash and Tithe.ly the axis is scope. Both bundle app, media, streaming, messaging and church management into one suite, and Nucleus's published rate table puts both at 3.0 percent plus 42 cents on cards - worse than 2.9 percent, and with the platform as merchant. If you need one vendor for check-in, groups and accounting alongside the website, The Church Co does not compete and points you at Planning Center or Pushpay instead. If you need a website, giving and a branded app, it is the only one of the four publishing every number before you talk to sales.
The bottom line
The Church Co is the cheapest honest price in this category and the only one that hands the church the payment rail. $29 a month hosts a site the vendor designs for free; $49 adds giving, forms, livestream and a members portal; $199 adds the branded app. Gifts run at typically 2.9 percent through the church's own Stripe account, which makes the fee the church's to absorb, to pass to givers, or to negotiate down with Stripe directly - a freedom its nearest rival explicitly does not offer at any price. The weaknesses are equally plain: one approximate fee figure and no published bank rate, an app behind a four-fold price jump, a free build that costs a one-year commitment, and terms that affirm you own your content without saying how you retrieve it. Small and mid-size churches wanting a professional site and giving they control will find little to argue with. Churches that need the app, or a printed schedule of every fee, should get both in writing during the 14 days.
Alternatives to The Church Co
NucleusThe direct rival: $99/month for the site plus $49 for Giving, at 1.9 percent on cards and 25 cents flat on bank transfers - a far better rate than 2.9 percent, but its help centre says the church cannot absorb it, so the saving lands with donors rather than the budget.
SubsplashAll-in-one web, app, media and church management in one suite. Nucleus's published rate table puts it at 3.0 percent plus 42 cents on cards, against 2.9 percent here. Pick it when you need one vendor for everything.
Tithe.lyGiving-first, grown into apps, sites and church management, listed at 3.0 percent plus 42 cents in Nucleus's comparison. Also one of The Church Co's own published integrations, so the two can be run together.
Planning CenterThe back office The Church Co does not attempt - people, services, check-in, groups, registrations - and a named integration on the $49 Premium plan. Pair the two rather than choosing between them.
SharefaithChurch websites bundled with a large media, graphics and kids-curriculum library. Worth a look if design assets matter more than giving architecture.Frequently asked questions
What does The Church Co actually cost?
Four published tiers, each printed as a per-month price billed annually: Basic $29, Premium $49, Ultimate $199 and Google Ads $499 - $348, $588, $2,388 and $5,988 a year. There is a 14-day free trial and no month-to-month price published anywhere. Setup is separate and one-time: free for the Simple package, or $299, $799 and $999 for Essentials, Tailored and Custom - the free option marked 1 Year Contract on the plan page and backed by a one-year minimum in the terms, the paid ones marked No Contract.
What are the giving fees, and can our church cover them instead of donors?
Both directions are available, which is the main reason to look at this product. The giving page publishes one figure - standard Stripe giving fees apply, typically 2.9 percent - and offers to let members opt in to covering processing fees so the church receives 100 percent of the gift. Because the church supplies its own Stripe API keys and is the merchant of record, it can equally leave the fee on its own side of the ledger. No fixed per-transaction amount and no bank transfer rate are published, so get those from Stripe directly.
Is the giving really free?
The vendor calls it free and also charges for it, in two places. The giving page is headed A Free Tool from The Church Co and names no platform percentage. The plan comparison lists Secure Online Giving as a Premium feature, absent from the $29 Basic plan - so the cheapest way to switch giving on is the $49 tier, $588 a year. Free is fair in the sense that The Church Co takes no cut of a gift; it is not free in the sense of being included at the entry price.
Does the custom mobile app cost extra?
It is not an add-on with a price - it is a plan. The app page states it is not available on basic or premium plans because you need the on-demand team in order to custom code the app, and Custom Mobile App appears only at Ultimate ($199/month) and above, so Premium to Ultimate is $588 to $2,388 a year. The church must hold its own Apple and Google developer accounts; with those in place the vendor says about 2 weeks, or about a month if they need creating.
What do we own, and what can we take with us if we leave?
The terms say your content is your content and you still own it when you upload it to The Church Co, but contain no export provision - no tooling, format or obligation for retrieving pages, sermons, media or giving history. The same terms grant the vendor perpetual, worldwide, free-of-charge use of your site for marketing and reserve the right to suspend or terminate the service at any time without notice. What does clearly stay with the church is the Stripe account holding the giving history and donor payment methods, plus the Apple and Google developer accounts holding the app listings. Ask for a written export path during the trial.
What is the App Store listing with no ratings?
Apple ID 1598474081, The Church Co App, is the vendor's demonstration build - seller name Paul Cox, copyright line The Church Co Demo 2021, last updated July 2024 at version 1.3.1, and showing no average because it has zero votes. A church on the Ultimate plan gets its own separately listed app under its own name, so the demo says nothing about what congregations experience, and the rating here is editorial for that reason.
Sources & further reading
- The Church Co - plan pricing and setup fees (Basic, Premium, Ultimate, Google Ads) ↗
- The Church Co - Giving ↗
- The Church Co - the custom church app ↗
- The Church Co - terms and privacy ↗
- The Church Co Help Centre - online giving via Stripe ↗
- Nucleus - pricing, for the head-to-head comparison ↗
- Nucleus - Giving, with its own vendor rate comparison table ↗
- Nucleus Help Centre - Can we pay the transaction fees instead of donors? ↗
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