Keeping the lights on
ChurchViewer is free to use. There is no paid tier, no feature held back, and no plan to add either. It's run by one person who pays for the server.
What it costs to run
One server carries every church on it. These are the published rates for what's actually running, so the total barely moves whether there are two churches or twenty.
| What | Why | A month |
|---|---|---|
| The server | One small virtual machine (2 shared cores, 4GB) running the site and the worker | ~$17 |
| Its disks | 10GB for the system, 100GB of working room for pulling audio out of video | ~$11 |
| The address | A fixed internet address for the domain to point at | ~$3 |
| The domain | churchviewer.com, paid yearly | ~$1 |
| Files | Recordings, slides and pictures. Pennies per church until it's years of video | a few cents |
| Transcription | Turning a recording into lyric slides, about half a cent a minute of audio | ~50¢ per busy church |
| About | $32–35 a month | |
Roughly $400 a year, paid by one person, whether anyone contributes or not.
What we ask
$5 a month, if your church can spare it. Seven churches at that covers the whole bill. It isn't a fee and it buys nothing — the software is the same either way.
A donation link hasn't been set up yet. Ask whoever runs this server how best to help.
And if you can't, don't
Plenty of churches are one bad year from closing the doors — including the one this was built for. If money is tight, use it, put it on the projector on Sunday, and give nothing. Nothing is switched off, nothing is nagged about, and nobody is told.
If it helps your church and you can't pay, that is the software doing its job.
Other ways to help
- Tell another church it exists.
- Say what broke, or what was confusing. That's worth more than five dollars.
- Send back a fix to the wording on a screen. Nobody proofreads their own slides.