The conversation that changed our pricing

The problem nobody talks about

When we first set out to build Gathrd, we weren't thinking much about pricing. We were thinking about the absurdity of a church having to list a harvest festival dinner, a Sunday school rota, and a regional prayer conference all in separate systems. But as we started talking to church staff, a different frustration emerged.

Churches run a lot of events. Not just the Sunday service. Bible study groups, youth nights, community meals, healing prayer meetings, weekend conferences, retreats. Some churches we spoke to were running eight or ten ticketed events a month across different groups and ministries.

On Eventbrite, that meant 8 to 10 transactions, each one bleeding money. A £15 ticket became £14.20 after fees. A £25 conference ticket became £23. For small churches operating on thin margins, those percentage points add up fast. A church running a dozen events a year could watch £200 to £300 disappear into platform fees alone.

The Durham administrator put it plainly: 'We're not trying to make money from events. We just need to cover costs and help people get there.' She wasn't asking for cheaper fees. She was asking for a different model entirely.

Why unlimited matters more than you'd think

The Church plan at £19.99 a month exists because of that conversation, and a hundred others like it. But the real insight came when we stopped thinking about 'pay per event' and started thinking about what churches actually need.

A church planting group might have a weekly gathering that requires ticketing for catering costs. A youth group runs monthly socials. The women's ministry hosts a quarterly conference. The prayer chain sends out invites every other week. In a traditional event platform world, each of these lives in a separate universe, or you pay again and again.

Unlimited events means something different when you're talking about a faith community. It means a youth leader can list a last-minute prayer meeting without thinking about whether it's 'worth' the transaction fee. It means a church can experiment with a new community event without financial friction. It means the admin burden drops because everything is in one place, with one login, one reporting view.

We kept the 3% fee on paid tickets because platforms have real costs. But the monthly subscription flips the economics. You're not penalising a church for being active. You're saying: 'Host as many events as your ministry demands. We'll cover our costs with a small percentage on ticket sales, nothing more.'

The feature that most people miss

Here's something nobody mentions when they talk about Gathrd. The Church plan includes Gift Aid automation.

If you're a UK church, you already know what this means. Gift Aid is free money. It's the government's way of boosting charitable giving by letting donors claim back tax relief. A £10 donation becomes £12.50. A £50 ticket becomes £62.50. For a church, Gift Aid can be anywhere from 5% to 30% of your annual giving, depending on your community.

But Gift Aid is also a paperwork nightmare. You need to collect declarations. You need to track which donations are eligible. You need to submit claims quarterly or annually. Most churches do this with spreadsheets or paper forms. It's slow. It's error-prone. And honestly, a lot of churches don't claim it at all because the admin burden isn't worth it.

We built split-checkout into the Church plan. When someone buys a ticket, they can add a Gift Aid donation in the same transaction. We handle the declaration capture, the eligibility checks, and we give the church the data they need to submit their claim. No forms to hunt down later. No spreadsheet wrestling.

This is why the plan exists at this price point. We're not just offering a ticketing system. We're building for the specific reality of running a church in 2024.

The door check-in that actually works offline

Launch week for the Church plan was busy. Too busy. We had a church in Scotland trying to check people in at a prayer conference on a Saturday morning when their internet went down. They were three minutes from starting, and they had 200 people in the lobby.

The door check-in system worked offline. QR code reader, loaded attendees on the device, no internet needed. The volunteers were confused at first - they expected it to fail. It didn't. By the time the internet was back, they'd checked in 190 people and nobody noticed anything had gone wrong.

This became one of the most requested features after launch. Turns out churches often meet in older buildings. Halls with spotty WiFi. Marquees with no signal. Community centres where the router is in a locked office. A ticketing system that can't work offline is a system that makes your event harder, not easier.

We baked offline check-in into the core of what we built because real church events happen in real buildings. We also integrated with TapTrust for NFC tap-to-check-in if you want something faster. But the foundation is simple: your event shouldn't depend on your internet.

The one thing we won't compromise on

When you list an event on Gathrd, it lives in a directory with other church events. Worship nights. Conferences. Prayer meetings. Community outreach. Denomination doesn't matter. We index across CofE, Catholic, Baptist, Pentecostal, non-denominational. But we have one non-negotiable rule: the directory is faith-only.

You will not see a worship night listed next to a nightclub. You will not see a prayer meeting sharing a page with a secular music event. This isn't because we have anything against other events. It's because churches asked us for it. Explicitly.

A church leader said to us: 'We want our members to discover events their faith community is running. Not events the algorithm thinks they might like based on their profile.' We listened. The faith-only directory is why a church can confidently point their congregation to Gathrd and know what they'll find.

This decision has cost us reach. We could be much bigger if we were just another general ticketing platform. But the Church plan at £19.99 a month only makes sense if we're actually solving for churches specifically, not trying to be everything to everyone.