Why Gathrd is free for churches (and why that was the only choice)
Six weeks before launch, one of our early testers, a Baptist minister in Manchester, sent me a message. Her church had just paid £180 in platform fees to Eventbrite for a retreat that cost them £800 to run. She asked: why does discovery have to be so expensive? I didn't have a good answer then. But I do now.
The moment we realised we'd built the wrong model
When MRVL first started building Gathrd, we copied what we saw everywhere else. Percentage fees. Per-ticket charges. It made sense on a spreadsheet. But then we started talking to the people actually running these events.
A church of 40 people hosting a prayer meeting. A monastery running a quiet day. A pastor in rural Wales trying to get 50 people together for a conference. Every conversation had the same subtext: discovery tools cost money, and money is tight. Most faith organisations run on volunteer energy and donated funds, not corporate budgets.
The turning point came when we realised something obvious but easy to miss: the people we were building this for didn't need another cost centre. They needed a partner. That changed everything about how we thought about pricing.
What free actually means, and what it doesn't
Let me be clear about this. Free doesn't mean we're not running a real business. When a church lists an event with free tickets, we charge nothing. When they sell tickets, we take 3 per cent. That's half what Eventbrite takes. And critically, there's no per-ticket fee stacked on top. A ticket is a ticket.
We also built Gift Aid automation directly into the checkout for UK churches. Most platforms treat Gift Aid like an afterthought, if they mention it at all. For churches, that's genuine money left on the table. We made it part of the split checkout, so a church can claim Gift Aid on donations without any extra work from the team running the event.
The free tier isn't loss-leading or a trial to upsell you later. It's the foundation. A church with one event a month paying 3 per cent on modest ticket sales probably pays us nothing meaningful. We're okay with that. We're not in it to squeeze small churches.
Why faith community gets a different kind of platform
Here's what actually bothers me about generic event platforms. You list your prayer meeting, and the algorithm puts it next to a nightclub. Not because anyone's evil. Just because a nightclub and a prayer meeting are both events. The system has no values.
Gathrd is different. The directory is faith-only by design. We'll never list a worship night next to a nightclub because that's not what our directory is for. If you're discovering an event on Gathrd, you're in a faith space. That matters more than most people realise, especially for church staff trying to find volunteers for a retreat or a parent looking for youth group options they can actually trust.
We also built denomination filtering from the start. A Catholic looking for retreats shouldn't have to wade through a hundred non-denominational events if that's not what they're after. A Pentecostal pastor shouldn't have to filter out Baptist conferences. The tool adapts to how faith communities actually talk about and find events.
The door check-in that actually works when the wifi doesn't
One of our testers ran a conference for 200 people. The venue's internet went down an hour before doors opened. On another platform, they would have been stuck with printed lists and manual sign-in sheets. On Gathrd, the QR check-in system was already offline-ready. It just worked.
That's the kind of thing you only learn by talking to people actually running events. Venues have flaky wifi. Power sockets go missing. Phone batteries die. We built features around what really happens, not what tech assumes happens.
We also integrated NFC through TapTrust, so if you want to use tap-to-check-in instead of scanning QR codes, that's there too. Some churches prefer it. Some don't. The platform adapts.
What free means for the future
I won't pretend our business model is proven. We're still early. But I know this: if we'd launched with everyone paying, we'd have missed the point of building this in the first place.
Faith communities need discovery tools. Not tools that treat them as a niche market to extract fees from, but actual tools built with their constraints and values in mind. Free for community use means a youth group can post a social event without negotiating with the finance team. It means a church planting in a new town can list their first gathering without worrying about platform costs on top of everything else.
The people who run these events are already stretched. They volunteer their time. They fundraise. They care deeply about what they're building. The last thing they need is a discovery platform that makes them feel nickel-and-dimed.
If you've ever run an event and watched it slowly get eaten by platform fees, or if you've searched for a faith gathering and ended up wading through noise, you know why this matters. The question isn't whether free software is sustainable. It's whether we can build something useful enough that people choose to use it, and choose to stick around. That's what we're betting on.