Having An App For Your Church Is No Longer Just For The Big Boys
In the old days, being not very long ago, having an iPhone/Droid/Blackberry app for your church was out of the question. Unless you were a mega-church of some kind and could pay the money to get some special developers.
But thanks to the decrease in cost, having an app for your church is within reach for many. Here are a few of the players out there:
As the name implies, they’re marketing themselves specifically for churches. They’ve done work for Mars Hill Church, Saddleback Church, Catalyst Conference, and others.
They have an initial setup cost of $999, plus hosting fees of $59 per month. They may be willing to work a little with the price, though.
One of the major players in the field is Mobile Roadie. According to their site, they’ve done mobile apps for such names as Madonna, Taylor Swift, Sony Music, and others. A friend of mine, Jaime Kowlessar used them to develop the app for his church. You can check it out here.
Their basic package begins with $499 setup and $29 per month, followed by their “plus” package at $999 setup and $49 per month. They also have a pro package that’s basically double the cost.
3. Mobile Salt
One of the most affordable in the group seems to be Mobile Salt. Their basic package begins with $199 setup and $19 per month. Their premium package is $299 setup and $39 per month. You can see some of the churches they’ve worked with here.
Now, all that being said, there is a final, and very cheap option…
If you have a WordPress-based site, you can install the WP Touch plugin for $39, which will give you almost all of the features of the other ones. It will basically make a mobile version of your conventional site. It won’t be as fancy, granted, but it will get the job done for the basic info.
So does your church have a mobile site? What do you guys use? If not, have you thought about moving to one?
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Hi, my name is Josh and I am the owner over at Mobilesalt. Thanks for the writeup!
It was great that you pointed out our price points as well. We have a passion to see every church be able to harness the power of mobile devices, not just the “big boys” as you stated.
If anyone has any questions about Mobilesalt please feel free to contact me, I would love to talk to you.
Thanks again!
Hey Josh. It was my pleasure. It seems that you guys do offer a great value. Hopefully some of the readers will check you out. Cheers.
Hey, Chris here with The Church App (thechurchapp.org)
Wow! Thanks Rodlie for including us in this list.
We’ve been thrilled to work with so many great ministries that proclaim the Gospel and are excited to continue to improve our software.
We actually now have packages starting at $499 and also allow full length high quality video inside of the app. Every features we create is designed specifically for the church.
If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to ask.
Thanks again Rodlie!
Chris Sharpe
Thanks for jumping in and sharing, Chris!
Rodlie,
I saw you mentioned Mobile Roadie above. My company, R04R (http://r04r.com) is the official church development partner for them. We take their CMS and customized it for churches and add our partners like YouVersion and Fellowship Technologies services into it. Most of the churches in the app store that have used the Mobile Roadie CMS were done by us. We also do web apps and custom apps as well. We would be happy to help any of your readers.
Matt McKee
ceo of R04R
Hmmm…interesting. Thanks for sharing this, Matt. I’ll have to update the post and throw it in.
Thanks Rodlie. If you want to read about the partnership you can find it here: http://mobileroadie.com/blog/2010/06/mobile-roadie-partners-with-r04r-for-church-apps/
Also, I’ve been lurking and reading your blog for a while. Sorry it took so long to comment. Keep up the great writing.
Hey I was researching and what about the churn apps by sermonaudio.com? Are they pretty viable?
I have no idea. What are “churn apps”?
Looks like mobilesalt was bought out by roar.