The Church plan that costs less than a tank of petrol

The maths that made us build this

When we launched Gathrd, I spent three weeks watching how churches actually ran their event bookings. They used Eventbrite. They used Google Forms. They used WhatsApp groups and Excel spreadsheets. What struck me wasn't the chaos; it was the cost they were bleeding without realising it.

Eventbrite takes 6.95% commission plus 59p per ticket. A church running a summer conference with 200 paid tickets at £25 each loses £347 to fees alone. Add their Gift Aid recovery into the picture, and most churches were doing manual spreadsheet work after the event ended anyway, trying to reclaim the donation portion through HMRC. It was medieval.

When we set the Church plan at £19.99 a month for unlimited events, the maths was deliberate. That fixed fee covers the hosting, the support, the upkeep. The 3% platform fee on paid tickets stays low because we're not trying to nickle-and-dime every transaction. A church running four events a month, even at full capacity, typically pays less than £80 total in fees. That same workload on Eventbrite would cost three times that.

Why unlimited doesn't mean free-for-all

The first instinct people have when they hear 'unlimited events' is to assume it's too good to be true, or that there's a catch buried in the small print. There isn't. Unlimited means exactly that: you list as many events as you want. Monthly prayer meetings, quarterly conferences, community suppers, youth nights, retreats. Each one gets its own listing page, its own QR check-in, its own ticket tracking.

What makes this work is that we're not a generic platform pretending to be good at everything. We built this specifically for churches and faith organisations. That means we don't have the overhead of supporting nightclub promoters, comedy nights, and corporate team-building events. Our entire infrastructure, our moderation, our feature development, all of it is laser-focused on what churches actually need.

The Church plan gets you the full toolkit: offline QR door check-in so you're not dependent on dodgy venue WiFi, Gift Aid automation that splits donations and donations at checkout, integrations with TapTrust for NFC check-in if you want to go contactless, and a faith-only directory where your event sits alongside other legitimate worship and community events. Not next to a nightclub listing. Not competing against a secular promotion.

Gift Aid was the feature that changed everything

One of our earliest users, a church planter in Manchester, messaged us in the first week to say she'd never realised Gift Aid could be claimed on ticket sales. She'd been running donation-based events for two years and hadn't reclaimed a penny because the manual process seemed impossible.

That's why Gift Aid split-checkout exists. When someone buys a ticket, we offer them the option to add Gift Aid at the point of purchase. They gift a portion of their ticket price, and you reclaim 25p for every pound. For a church with regular events, this can add hundreds of pounds back into your ministry budget, automatically, without any spreadsheet work.

The split-checkout means your attendee sees a single payment screen. On the back end, we separate the ticket revenue from the Gift Aid donation so you can claim it correctly with HMRC. It sounds small. In practice, it's the difference between breaking even on an event and actually funding the next one.

Check-in that doesn't fall apart when the WiFi does

We learned early that asking a church volunteer to manage door check-in on a glitchy events app is a recipe for chaos. So we built offline QR check-in. You scan a ticket code at the door; it works even if your venue has no internet signal. When WiFi comes back, the check-in data syncs automatically. No missed attendees. No duplicate scans. No one standing at the entrance with an iPad in airplane mode, squinting at barcodes.

If you want something faster, TapTrust integration gives you NFC tap-check with card-sized tags. Attendees tap their ticket, event wristband, or even a phone with NFC enabled, and they're checked in instantly. It's the kind of detail that matters when you're running a retreat for 300 people and you need to know how many actually showed up for the final session.

The faith-only part isn't a marketing gimmick

We made a deliberate choice not to list secular events. You won't see a worship night next to a nightclub promotion. You won't find your church Christmas carols competing for attention against a comedy night ticket. It sounds like a small decision, but it's shaped everything we build.

Our directory is for people looking for faith community, ministry opportunities, or worship experiences. When someone opens Gathrd, they're not wading through irrelevant noise to find the prayer meeting they're actually interested in. Denomination filters let them narrow by tradition if they want. Location finds events near them. It's efficient. It feels purposeful.

That focus also means we can build features specifically for churches without compromise. Gift Aid doesn't make sense for a nightclub. Denomination filtering isn't relevant for a corporate event. We're not trying to be everything to everyone; we're trying to be excellent for the thing we actually care about.

What £19.99 buys you, month to month

The Church plan sits at the right price point because most of our churches use it month to month. Pay for January, list your events for January, get billed again in February. No annual commitment required unless you want one. For churches running a few events a month, it's about the cost of a decent coffee subscription.

What you get: unlimited event listings, all the features above, email support, Stripe Connect payouts so you get paid directly to your church account, and access to both the iOS and Android apps plus the discovery site on getgathrd.app. If you're a bigger organisation running a conference or running events across multiple locations, we have other plans. But most churches fit comfortably into the £19.99 tier and never hit a limit.

The Ministry plan at £49.99 adds dedicated support and some automation features for larger teams. The Conference plan at £149.99 is for organisations running single major events. But honestly, most of the feedback we get is from churches saying the Church plan covers everything they need without the overhead.