The Ekklesia moment that changed how we built Komuniti
In January 2023, we had a working app. It wasn't yet Komuniti. It was a mobile community space that worked, but it was alone. A church in South London asked us a single question: "Can you talk to our member database?" That question ended up reshaping everything we've built since.
We were solving the wrong half of the problem
When we started, the brief was simple. Replace WhatsApp groups. Pastors were drowning in side conversations. Members were missing announcements because they were buried under memes and arguments. We built a private, structured space with groups by department, a prayer wall, event RSVP, volunteer rotas. It worked. But when you put it in front of real church administrators, something became obvious fast: we'd solved the communication problem. We hadn't solved the member problem.
The South London church had 180 members spread across Ekklesia, their member management system. When they invited people into our app, they had to manually add them. Add them again to groups. Update them when roles changed. When someone left the church, we had no way to know. The pastor was maintaining two separate lists, and we were just making him type twice.
That's when the lightbulb went off. We weren't building a communication platform. We were building part of a church's operating system. And we were doing it badly because we pretended we were standalone.
Integration meant something different than we thought
We could have built an API. A sync job. A webhook that fired when Ekklesia changed. Technically that would work. But we watched how churches actually operate, and realised something. A pastor doesn't think in API calls. They think in people. When Tom moves from leading worship to leading the youth group, that's one decision in Ekklesia. It should be one ripple outward. Tom's role changes. Instantly, she's in a different Komuniti group. Instantly, the volunteer rota knows.
Native integration meant more than data syncing. It meant the app itself understood Ekklesia's language. Member types. Roles. Permissions. When a pastor sets up Komuniti, they don't configure "sync settings". They plug in their Ekklesia credentials and the app handles the rest. New members join the church in Ekklesia. Automatically, they appear in the appropriate Komuniti groups based on their role. It's not magic. It's just common sense engineering.
But it changed how we thought about what Komuniti could become.
One integration opened the door to the others
Once we'd built Ekklesia integration properly, the architecture was in place. Other integrations started making sense. The prayer wall became meaningful when you could see who's praying. The announcements meant more when they could include a giving link. Givr came next. Native Gift Aid support. A pastor could broadcast an announcement with a giving option, and on the giver's side, it was frictionless. No redirects. No external links. Just Komuniti handling it, with Givr managing the backend.
Then came Streamr. Live service streaming. We could embed it directly. Members could watch the Sunday service in Komuniti, see the sermon notes, respond in the prayer wall, all without leaving the app. That's when we realised something. We weren't just integrating tools. We were building a stack. The MRVL stack. Five moving parts that fit together because they were designed to.
No US competitor offers this in GBP at this price. Most of them offer Kommuniti, or Churchify, or Planning Center. They're good products. But they're individual tools. We'd accidentally built something different. A closed loop. A church could manage members in Ekklesia, run volunteer rotas in Komuniti, take giving through Givr, stream their Sunday service through Streamr, and every single part knew about the others.
The lock-in nobody minded
There's a difference between lock-in that serves the customer and lock-in that serves the company. We got letters from churches saying things like: "We tried moving away, but it was going to cost us six hours of admin to rebuild what you've built for us." That's the good kind. Not because they're trapped. Because they're efficient.
A pastor at a 260-member church told us something I keep coming back to. "With WhatsApp, we were all drowning. With Komuniti, we're just managing the flow." That's what the stack does. It's not about features. It's about a complete thought. A member joins, they're in Ekklesia. They're immediately in the right Komuniti groups. When they give, they give through Givr, and it's recorded, and it's treated with the respect Gift Aid deserves. When they want to watch a sermon again, it's there in Streamr. Everything connects because it was built to connect.
That South London pastor never asked for a lock-in. They asked for their app to understand their church. The stack is what happens when you actually listen to that.
What we learned about building for a real market
There's a pattern to how technology works in UK churches. They're not looking for disruption. They're looking for dignity. A decent app built for them, not one adapted from American SaaS that doesn't understand Gift Aid or the way a pastoral team actually operates. Ekklesia understood that. Givr understood that. Streamr understood that. And when we stopped being a standalone app and started being part of something thoughtful, we understood it too.
We're free for home groups and small churches (3 groups, 20 members, 1 event RSVP a month). Starter for the 20 to 100 member crowd. Pro for larger churches. Enterprise for the multi-campus operations. But the reason the pricing works is because the stack works. A church isn't evaluating five separate subscriptions. They're evaluating one operating system that costs less than it would to keep paying subscriptions to half a dozen US companies.
The Ekklesia integration was never supposed to be special. It was just the right thing to do. But it turned out to be the thing that changed what we built next, and what we'll build next. A real partnership with platforms that understood exactly what a UK church needs.
If you run a church and you're still managing members in a spreadsheet and announcements in WhatsApp, what would it feel free to have everything in one place that was actually built for you?