Planning Center

Planning Center is a set of church management products sold individually: People for membership records, Services for worship planning and scheduling, Music Stand for digital sheet music, Church Center as a custom mobile app, Publishing for pages and media, Giving for donations, Registrations, Groups, Calendar and Check-Ins. A free base tier is published and each product is subscribed to separately by monthly plan.

Charging per product rather than per suite is the structural decision and it is the reason churches of very different sizes end up here. A small congregation that only needs to schedule volunteers pays for Services and nothing else, while a large multi site church runs the full set. Suites priced as one bundle force the small church to fund modules it will never open, which is precisely the objection that keeps volunteer run churches on spreadsheets.

Publishing the giving processing rates openly, down to the difference between domestic cards, American Express, international cards and bank transfer, matters more than the subscription price for most churches. Donation volume is large relative to software spend, so a fraction of a percent on processing outweighs the monthly fee.

A savings calculator against a church's current provider follows from that arithmetic, and it is aimed squarely at switching rather than at first time buyers.