If you run a small church, you probably know the drill. You need software for member management, online giving, volunteer scheduling, and service planning. You Google it, and every result points to Planning Center.

Then you see the pricing. $299-1,466/month for the full suite. For a church of 150 people running on a tight budget, that's a big ask.

I've been running a small group at my church for years, and I've watched our admin team struggle with this exact problem. Spreadsheets for attendance, Venmo for tithes, group texts for volunteer coordination. It works, but barely.

So I built something. It's called Pews, and it does everything Planning Center does for $100/month flat. No per-module pricing, no feature gating. Here's what it looks like and why I think small churches deserve better tools.

What Small Churches Actually Need

I talked to about a dozen church admins before building anything. The wish list was surprisingly consistent:

  • Member directory with contact info, family groupings, and tags (visitor, member, leader)
  • Online giving that actually works on mobile and sends tax receipts
  • Check-ins for kids ministry (parents need to know their children are safe)
  • Service planning so the worship team knows what songs they're playing Sunday
  • Volunteer scheduling because texting 15 people every Wednesday gets old fast
  • Basic reporting on attendance trends and giving patterns

Planning Center does all of this. So does Pews. The difference is the price tag and the complexity.

A Quick Tour

Here's the dashboard. One screen, everything you need to know about your church this week:

Pews dashboard showing active members, attendance, giving, and upcoming events

21 active members, $8,200 in giving this month, upcoming events on the right, engagement scoring at the bottom. No clicking through five different apps to get the full picture.

The people directory uses card-based layouts with status badges. You can filter by tag, status, or just search:

Pews people directory with member cards showing contact info and status

And the giving module tracks donations by fund with breakdowns and trend data:

Pews giving dashboard showing monthly totals, recent donations, and fund breakdown

How It Compares to Planning Center

Let me be honest. Planning Center is a great product. They've been doing this for over a decade and they have features Pews doesn't have yet (like a full mobile app for members). But here's the trade-off:

  • Planning Center: $1,466/month for full feature set in all modules. Individual modules are $14-99/month each, and most churches need at least 3-4.
  • Pews: $100/month flat. Everything included. Online giving runs through Stripe, so churches keep their own Stripe account and full control of their funds.

For a church of 100-300 members, that's $1,200/year in savings. That's a youth group trip. That's a month of a missionary's support. It matters.

What's Under the Hood

Pews is built on Go and SvelteKit with PostgreSQL. It's multi-tenant from the ground up, so every church gets isolated data with a single deployment. The service planning module lets worship leaders build setlists, assign volunteers, and track service history:

Pews service planning showing upcoming and past services with status badges

Other things worth mentioning:

  • Dark mode because church admins work late on Saturday nights too
  • Stripe Connect so each church has their own payment processing. We just take a 1% platform fee on giving.
  • Engagement scoring that flags at-risk members based on attendance and giving patterns. So you can follow up before they drift away.
  • Check-in kiosk mode that runs on any tablet. Print labels for kids ministry.

Who This Is For

Pews isn't for megachurches with 5,000 members and a full IT department. Those churches can afford Planning Center and probably should use it.

Pews is for the church of 50-500 that needs real software but can't justify $2,400/year for it. The church that's currently using a combination of Google Sheets, Mailchimp, and Venmo. The church where the pastor's wife is also the admin, the bookkeeper, and the volunteer coordinator.

If that sounds like your church, check out the live demo at demo.pews.app (login: demo-church / demo@pews.app / demo1234) or visit pews.app to learn more.

Lessons Learned

  • Talk to users first. The feature list came from actual church admins, not my assumptions.
  • Price for the market. Small churches think in monthly budget line items. $100 is approachable. $199 triggers a board vote.
  • Don't compete on features. Compete on simplicity and price. Most churches use maybe 40% of Planning Center's features.
  • Give them their data. Stripe Connect means churches own their payment history. They're not locked into your platform.
  • Build for the admin who isn't technical. If the pastor's wife can't figure it out in 10 minutes, it's too complicated.

More updates coming. Next on the roadmap: a Planning Center data importer so churches can migrate without starting over.