Full disclosure: I'm not a churchgoer. I was raised Catholic; I'm agnostic now; Jess is mostly lapsed Protestant. So this vertical wasn't on my radar until a friend who runs a small non-denominational church called me and asked what I'd recommend.
"Planning Center," I said.
"It's $60 a month by the time we add the pieces we need."
"Breeze?"
"Same range."
"...What does your volunteer treasurer do?"
"Excel. But she's 73."
churchadmin came out of that conversation. It's an ops stack for small churches that a volunteer treasurer can actually run, priced at the low end (or free if self-hosted), and built with the specific workflows small congregations actually need.
The Data Model
Household-first. Every record starts with a family, which contains members. This matches how small-church data flows — you do a directory by family, you send giving statements by family, you invite the whole family to the potluck. Trying to model everything as individuals is how you end up with three duplicate records for the same kid because mom, dad, and the youth leader all typed the name slightly differently.
CREATE TABLE family (
id INTEGER PRIMARY KEY,
name TEXT NOT NULL, -- 'The Jones Family'
primary_address TEXT,
notes TEXT,
joined_at DATE
);
CREATE TABLE member (
id INTEGER PRIMARY KEY,
family_id INTEGER NOT NULL REFERENCES family(id),
first_name TEXT NOT NULL,
last_name TEXT,
relationship TEXT, -- 'head', 'spouse', 'child', 'other'
dob DATE,
email TEXT,
phone TEXT
);When a kid ages out (turns 19, moves out), they split into their own household with a lineage pointer to the original. Marriages merge two households. Divorces split them. The merging logic is the single most-tested part of the codebase.
Giving Statements
The January giving-statement run is the single highest-stakes operation of the church year. Every family gets an IRS-compliant PDF with their contributions for the prior year. Get the number wrong and the family can't deduct correctly. Miss a household and they come in on Sunday and ask, politely, where their statement is.
churchadmin generates all of them in one batch. PDF per household. Email the PDFs out (or print if the family has opted-out of email). The batch is idempotent — you can re-run after a correction and the second version supersedes the first with a clearly labeled revision.
The PDF template is customizable to your congregation's letterhead. The IRS boilerplate ("no goods or services were provided in exchange...") is included, and the church accountant can review the actual language.
Attendance + Outreach
Log service attendance per Sunday. Click on a family to check them in, or scan a barcode if you've done that work. The system builds a "haven't seen in 6+ weeks" list automatically. That list is the pastoral-care outreach queue — people who've missed long enough to warrant a phone call, but not so long that the call's awkward.
The alternative is a committee member going through the directory from memory every week. That doesn't scale past about 80 families. This does.
Small Groups
Most small churches have some kind of small-group structure — bible study, young adults, men's group, women's group, neighborhood groups. churchadmin tracks group rosters, meeting schedules, per-meeting attendance, and auto-suggests new members to groups based on neighborhood + life stage (newlyweds go to the young-couples group, new parents go to the parents group, etc.).
Group leaders get a lightweight dashboard. No pastoral software PhD required — mostly a list of names and a check-off.
Pricing
- Self-host: $0. Complete feature set. Run it on a Raspberry Pi in the church office closet.
- Hosted Pro: $29/mo. Managed, automatic giving statements, email + SMS for missed-service follow-up, Stripe-collected event payments.
- Denomination: $99/mo. Multi-church / diocesan accounts, consolidated reporting, SSO for staff.
A 150-family church at $29/month spends $348/year. The equivalent commercial option is $600-1,200/year. Self-hosting is $0 + the ~4 hours of setup from someone who's comfortable with a command line.
Small churches are not small businesses. They're volunteer-run community institutions with a donor base measured in hundreds, not thousands. Software pricing should reflect that.
Privacy Note
Church data is sensitive. It includes religious affiliation, giving history, family structure, and sometimes pastoral-care notes about health and crisis events. None of that should be in a vendor's cloud without a very good reason.
churchadmin's default is: your data stays on your server. Hosted Pro is opt-in, and uses per-congregation encryption keys. Nothing is cross-contaminated between customers.
Who It's For
Congregations of 40-500 families. Denominational or non-denominational. Protestant, Catholic, Orthodox, Jewish, Mosque, Buddhist temple — most of the model transfers. The specifically-Christian language ("Sunday service," "bible study") is configurable strings.
Related
meetingmind for elder-board and committee meetings. familyhub if your small-group leaders want a shared calendar. bookcircle for the reading-oriented small groups.