Sixteen of them, answered plainly, with the honest "not yet" left in. Written for the deacon who has to explain this at the business meeting, and for the pastor who wants to know what he is agreeing to.
The part the treasurer reads twice.
YesThe whole product, free and open-source under the AGPL v3 license. Not a trial, not a starter tier, not free-until-you-have-fifty-members. You download it, you install it on your own hosting, and you never make an account with us.
What you do pay for is whatever you already pay for a church website: your domain name and your web hosting, to whoever you buy those from.
By doing the work for churches that would rather not do it themselves. Done-for-you setup, imagery, the radio station, and ongoing care are billed at $300 an hour, flat, and hosting and the domain are passed through at cost plus 30 percent. There is no monthly plan and no per-member fee.
A church that installs it itself pays us nothing and owes us nothing. That is on purpose. The full pricing page spells both paths out.
NoSame code, same features, same radio station. The paid path is a person doing the work, not a "Pro" edition with the good parts unlocked. If you hire MattCreates and later decide to run it yourself, nothing changes on the server. You just stop paying for hours.
Not yetThere is no self-serve checkout and no account system, and we would rather tell you that than pretend. The free download is live today. For done-for-you work, ask for early access with an email address and a person writes back. That form stores your address on our own server and nowhere else.
What "you own it" means when you actually check.
It means there is nothing of yours on our computers. The website is a folder of files on a host you pay for. The domain is registered in your church's name at a registrar you chose. Your service times, sermons, prayer list and member directory live in plain files in that folder, not in a vendor's database.
Leaving FaithKit is copying that folder somewhere else. The ownership page goes through every piece.
Your website keeps working. There is no license key to expire, no server of ours it checks in with, no login it needs from us. The code is open-source under the AGPL, so any web developer in your county can read it, fix it, and keep it going.
That is the honest reason a single-person company can ask for a church's trust: the product is built so the church does not depend on the company.
When someone opens your website, their browser talks to your server and to nothing else. No analytics, no tracking pixel, no fonts loaded from Google, no scripts from a content network, no chat widget phoning home. The fonts, images, audio and video are all served from your own domain.
You can check this yourself in any browser: open the page, open the developer tools, look at the Network tab, and see that every request goes to your domain. This site and the sample church pass that same test.
In plain files in the data/ folder on your own server, behind a members password you set at setup. The prayer list, the directory, missionary letters — none of it is sent to us, and no line of code sends it anywhere. Back those files up the way you back up any other church records.
Every answer on this page is checked against the software as it ships today. Where something is not built yet, it says not yet, because the church that trusts a plain answer is the church we want to serve.
For whoever gets volunteered.
NoYou need someone comfortable uploading files to a web host and following a setup page. There is no code to write. After setup, everything is done in a plain admin screen: service times, sermons, events, the prayer list. The install page lists the six real steps and how long each honestly takes.
Ordinary PHP 8 web hosting, the kind almost every host sells for a few dollars a month, plus a way to upload files. There is no database server to create and no special software to install. The automatic sermon slicer is the one optional piece that wants ffmpeg on the host; if yours does not have it, run the slicer on a laptop and upload the finished clips.
YesCopy the folder to the new host, point your domain at it, done. Nothing on our end to cancel or export. If your domain is currently tangled up with an old provider, the Journal has a plain walk-through: How to move your church website without losing your domain.
If you installed it yourself, you do: new versions are a fresh download, and your content, settings and media live in their own folders (config/, data/, media/) that you carry across. If MattCreates set it up for you, updates are part of the care you pay for by the hour. Either way there is no auto-updater quietly changing your website overnight.
The questions a pastor asks that a vendor never expects.
It was built by a church member, starting from a real congregation's website, for the kind of plain, Bible-preaching, King James congregation he knows. There is no doctrinal statement baked into the software, and any church can use it. But it was not designed by a marketing department to be all things to all churches, and the sample church looks like the churches it came from.
You upload a recording of a service you already held. The slicer finds the natural pauses, cuts the recording into clips, evens the volume, and adds them to a station that plays on your homepage from your own server. Nothing is broadcast, nothing is streamed through a vendor, and there is no broadcast license involved: it is your church's own recordings of its own preaching, on its own website.
One plain caution: if a recording includes copyrighted music, that is the same licensing question it would be for any recording you publish. The preaching is yours. The radio page shows the whole thing.
NoCornerstone is the sample church in the demo, a made-up congregation so you can see a finished site with real-looking content and poke around the admin (the password is cornerstone). We do not present any church as a customer that has not said so itself, and we do not invent testimonials.
Parts of the code and copy were drafted with AI tools under a human's direction and review, and we think a church deserves to be told that plainly rather than find out. What we believe about the limits of those tools, and about what must never be handed to them, is written down in the Baptist AI Statement. Nothing about your website or your members runs through an AI service, ever.
Write to a person. Plain questions get plain answers, usually the same day, and the good ones end up on this page.
The sample church runs the exact package you would install. Admin password cornerstone.