Ekkli Pricing: Simple, Fair Plans for Churches of Any Size

Six months free on the whole platform — up to 50 people, no card required. After that, plans start at €29 a month, and prices adjust automatically for your part of the world. This page lays out exactly what each plan costs and what it includes, with no hidden tiers and no asterisks.

Giving is free, on every plan, always

Before the table, the thing that costs you nothing: gifts are paid straight into your church's own Stripe or Mollie account. We take no percentage, never hold your funds, and add nothing to the payment processor's own fee. Giving is never a paid extra and is never switched off — not during the trial, not if a payment fails, not ever. It is your money in your account.

The six-month free trial

The trial is the whole product, not a demo. Worship presentation and live display, the song library, a church website, member records and the member directory, rotas and service plans, volunteer availability, groups and forum, the events calendar with RSVP and waitlists, giving, push notifications, sermon audio, and the congregation app.

Three things are capped, because each one costs real money to provide:

• Media storage is 2 GB. One shared allowance covering sermon audio, images and any video. At the cap new uploads are blocked — nothing is ever deleted automatically, because a sermon recording is often a church's only copy.
• No bulk email. Push notifications are unlimited and cover announcements. Email campaigns start on the Growing plan.
• No SMS. Not on the trial.

Your site runs on an ekkli.net address with a small "Powered by Ekkli" footer. Optional add-ons — listed below — are paid extras and are not part of the trial. There is a plain walkthrough of everything included on the features page.

There is no permanently free plan. When the six months end you choose one. We would rather say that here than let you find out in month five. Six months is long enough to run two full seasons and train a volunteer team, which is a fairer test than thirty days.

Plans and pricing at a glance

The figures below are our standard rate, which applies in countries including Ireland, the UK, Germany, the Netherlands, France, Spain, Austria and Switzerland. Many parts of the world pay considerably less — see regional pricing below. All prices are + VAT where applicable. Paying annually saves around 17%.

Worth a sanity check against what you already spend: we have written up what a typical church software stack costs when it is assembled from separate presentation, website, podcast and communication tools. For most churches the comparison is closer than they expect, and the presentation software alone is usually charged per machine.

What the people limit actually counts

This is the most misread number on any church pricing page, so plainly: it counts people taking part in your church inside Ekkli — members with an account, in groups, on rotas, receiving your communications. It is not your Sunday attendance, and it is not everyone who has ever walked through the door. Under-18s do not count toward it.

It is also a soft limit. Go over it and we tell you and adjust the invoice on your next billing date — nothing locks and nobody gets thrown out. Please do not keep people out of the system to stay in a plan; a church that does that gets a worse product, and we would rather have the conversation.

What every plan includes

• Giving. Your own Stripe or Mollie account, one-off and recurring gifts, funds, donor statements. No cut, no extra fee.
• Worship presentation and live display. Unlimited screens, phone remote, stage view, offline export.
• Your church website on an ekkli.net address, with pages, news, galleries and the events calendar.
• Member records, the member directory, rotas and service plans, with volunteer availability and the full confirm, decline and swap cycle.
• Groups, forum, direct messages, prayer requests and the congregation app, with unlimited push notifications.
• Event registration with capacity limits, waitlists, guest sign-up and headcount attendance.
• Unlimited admin and leader accounts. No per-seat pricing, ever — not for admins, not for worship teams, not for the machines running your screens.
• Full data export, by you, at any time, including during the trial and after a lapse.
• Support, at the same level on every plan — see below.
• Taking part in another church's hosted network. If a church you work with runs one and invites you in, there is nothing extra to pay; it is included on whatever plan you are on, right down to Small.

Optional add-ons

Same price on every plan. Higher plans include some at no extra cost — see the list underneath.

Included at no extra cost: Small adds custom domain support. Growing adds the podcast feed. Sunday adds Reach. Ministry adds Production.

Paid by usage: extra media storage at €5 per 25 GB a month, extra email at €4 per 1,000 sends, and SMS credits bought in advance at your country's rate.

What a hosted network is

Some churches work together — a sending church with three plants, a regional group, a denomination. A hosted network is a shared private space for that group: a common forum, a shared events board, and a classifieds board for passing on equipment and finding speakers.

One church pays the €39 to run it, usually the largest or the central one. Every other church invited into it takes part on whatever Ekkli plan it is already on, with nothing extra to pay for the network itself. You never need this to use Ekkli — most churches never will.

Email — what to know before you plan on it

The trial and Small are push-only. That is a deliberate decision rather than a squeeze: a plant or a home group lives in the app, where group chat, direct messages and targeted push notifications reach everyone who is actually there.

Bulk email starts at Growing, because that is the point at which a congregation genuinely needs it — a weekly notices email is a fixture of church life, and an AGM notice needs an attachment and a record that it went out.

Every church that sends bulk email sends it from its own domain. Before your first campaign you add three records to your domain's settings, and we check them before switching sending on. It is a real step and it needs whoever controls your domain — we walk you through it, and if nobody at your church is comfortable doing it, we can set it up for you for a one-off fee. The reason for the requirement is straightforward: it means your email reputation belongs to you, and no other church on the platform can damage it.

Support

The same on every plan, and on the free trial: a searchable knowledge base, a community forum where churches help each other, and email support from an actual person. We have not put support behind a tier, and we have no plans to.

Fair, regional pricing

Ekkli's price is not one flat number for the whole world. It adjusts automatically from your church's country, so a congregation in a lower-cost economy is not paying the same euro amount as one in Dublin or Zurich. Churches in South America and Africa in particular pay significantly less than the figures above, and there are reductions across much of the rest of the world too.

We do not publish a country-by-country table, for a simple reason: the adjustment is applied automatically when you register, and a table would go stale the moment anything changed. Start your six months free and you will see your church's actual price, in your own currency terms, long before any card is involved.

One honest note. Allowances — email sends, storage, SMS — scale with what a plan earns in its region rather than being identical everywhere. A plan costing a fraction of the standard rate cannot carry the same email capacity; that is arithmetic rather than geography, and the same formula runs in every country.

Above 500 people

Ministry is the largest published plan. Larger congregations, multi-site churches and regional networks are welcome and well supported — the pricing simply stops being a table and starts being a conversation. Get in touch and we will quote.

If a payment ever fails

Cards expire and banks put holds on things, and the usual cause of a failed payment is not a decision anyone made. So: automatic retries for the first week, then a fortnight of notices to every admin rather than only to whoever pays. If it is still unresolved after about five weeks, the service winds down until it is sorted out.

Some things we will not do at any stage. We will not put a billing message on the screen in front of your congregation. We will not switch off giving — it is your payment account, and it is how you would pay us. We will not block your data export, ever. And we will not delete anything: your data is kept for twelve months after a full lapse, with every admin notified thirty days before anything goes. Reactivate at any point and everything comes back immediately, billed from that day. We never charge for the months you were away.

Frequently asked questions

What happens when the six months end?

You choose a paid plan. There is no permanently free plan to fall back on, so it is a real decision point rather than a soft downgrade. Nothing is deleted the moment the trial ends, and a full export is available to you throughout.

Do I need a card to start?

No. No card at signup and none during the six months. You only enter payment details if you decide to continue.

Is the trial a cut-down version of the product?

No — it is the full core platform, and the features page lists all of it. The only limits are 2 GB of media, no bulk email and no SMS. The optional add-ons listed above are paid extras rather than trial features.

Do the children in our church count toward the people limit?

No. Under-18s are excluded.

What if nobody at our church knows how to change DNS settings?

Then ask us and we will do it for you, for a one-off setup fee. It applies to both jobs that need it — pointing your own domain at your site, and the records that let you send email from your own domain. It is genuinely a five-minute job for someone who has done it before, and a genuinely unnerving one for someone who has not, so there is no shame in handing it over.

Do these prices include VAT?

Prices are shown + VAT where applicable, based on your church's location and the relevant tax rules. Checkout shows the final amount including any tax before you confirm.

Can we change plans as the church grows?

Yes — up as your people, email or storage needs grow, and down if a smaller plan fits better. You are never locked into a plan and there is no minimum term.

Can we pay from a personal bank account?

Yes. Plenty of church plants have no legal entity or church bank account yet, and one person pays. Direct debit works well for this — there is no card to expire and no reissue to break the subscription.

Is there a discount for small or newly planted churches?

Pricing adjusts by region rather than by church size, so a congregation in a lower-cost economy pays materially less than the standard rate. Beyond that, Small at €29 is already priced for a church plant rather than for a budget.