In 2021, we built a church management software and tried to sell it.
It didn’t work the way we expected. So in 2023, we gave it away.
That decision — to open-source ChurchCMS under the MIT licence — changed the trajectory of the product entirely. Today it’s used by churches in 14 countries, and we run a small services business around it that makes honest sense. But the path from “commercial SaaS” to “free church management software” wasn’t a straight line, and I think the story is worth telling honestly.
How It Started
GegoSoft is a small software company based in Madurai, Tamil Nadu. We build web and mobile applications, mostly for clients across India and overseas. In 2021, our team started noticing a pattern in conversations with churches — particularly smaller congregations — about how they managed their operations.
Most were using spreadsheets. WhatsApp groups. Printed attendance registers. A few had tried commercial church management platforms but found them either too expensive, too complex, or designed for a completely different cultural context — mostly large American megachurches with online giving workflows built around credit cards and ACH transfers.
We saw an opportunity. We knew Laravel. We knew how to build clean, modern web applications. So we built ChurchCMS — a full church management platform with member directories, giving tracking, attendance QR codes, event management, communication tools, and an Android app. We launched it as a SaaS with monthly pricing.
Why the Commercial Model Struggled
I’ll be honest about what happened: the traction wasn’t what we hoped for.
The Indian church market — which was our initial focus — had a specific set of conversion problems. Churches were genuinely interested in the product. The demos went well. But when it came to subscribing to monthly software, the friction was real.
Part of it was pricing sensitivity. Even modest subscription fees felt like a recurring budget line item that required pastoral committee approval. Church decision-making is slow by design — it’s run by volunteers with pastoral priorities, not by procurement managers.
Part of it was trust. We were a small company from Madurai asking churches to put their member data into our cloud. For many pastors, that felt like a significant leap of faith with no safety net.
And part of it was competition we hadn’t fully accounted for. Planning Center, Breeze, and ChurchTrac were already deeply embedded in Western church communities. They had years of trust, integrations, and word-of-mouth behind them. Breaking into that market as an unknown Indian SaaS company was a much steeper climb than we’d planned.
We had a good product. We didn’t have a path to the market we’d aimed at.
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The Moment the Thinking Changed
The shift in our thinking didn’t come from a business strategy session. It came from a conversation with a pastor in Kenya.
He had found ChurchCMS online, explored the demo, and reached out asking if we had a self-hosted version — because his church couldn’t commit to a monthly subscription in dollars, but he had a developer friend who could set it up on a local server. He was willing to do the work. He just needed the software.
That conversation sat with me for a while. Here was exactly the kind of church we had built this for — a growing congregation in a country with a fast-expanding Christian population, led by someone who understood technology and was motivated to use it — and our pricing model was the barrier.
How many pastors like him were out there? How many churches in Nigeria, Philippines, Brazil, Ethiopia — where Christianity is growing faster than anywhere else in the world — were hitting the same wall?
The commercial model we’d built was accidentally optimised for the markets least likely to adopt it quickly, and unavailable to the markets most hungry for exactly what we’d made.
The Decision to Open-Source
We decided to release ChurchCMS under the MIT licence — the most permissive open-source licence available. No restrictions. Churches could download it, install it on their own servers, modify it, and use it forever, completely free.
The MIT licence specifically means: you can use this software for any purpose, modify it, distribute it, and even build commercial products on top of it — without asking us, without paying us, without attribution requirements. We wanted zero friction for adoption.
That decision had an obvious business risk attached to it. If the software is free, what’s the revenue model?
The answer, which I think is actually more honest than most SaaS models anyway, is this: the software is free. We charge for our time.
Specifically, we offer managed hosting at $29 per month for churches that want the product but not the technical responsibility of running a server. We offer a one-time installation service at $99 for churches that want to self-host but need someone to set it up properly. And we take on custom development projects for churches and developers who want ChurchCMS extended or white-labelled for their specific context.
That’s a simpler, cleaner, more honest proposition than “pay us a monthly fee and we’ll let you use the software we control.”
What Changed After the Pivot
The adoption pattern changed almost immediately once we removed the paywall.
Within months, ChurchCMS was being used by churches in the United States, the United Kingdom, Nigeria, Kenya, the Philippines, and Brazil — markets we hadn’t actively sold into, and some we hadn’t even considered when we built the product. Developers in these regions found the GitHub repository, deployed it for churches they knew, and started contributing improvements back.
The community that formed around an open-source project is fundamentally different from the customer base of a SaaS product. Developers who use ChurchCMS professionally have a stake in making it better. Churches that deploy it themselves have a sense of ownership over the platform. That kind of engagement doesn’t happen when people are paying a monthly fee for access to something they don’t control.
We also discovered something we hadn’t expected: the services business — hosting, installation, custom development — converts better from an open-source model than it ever did from a locked SaaS. When a church administrator can fully evaluate the software, test it with their actual data, and then decide whether to pay us to set it up or host it — that’s a much healthier sales conversation than asking for a subscription before they’ve seen what they’re getting.
What Free Church Management Software Actually Means
“Free” in software often means one of two things: either it’s a stripped-down trial version designed to upsell you, or it’s a product being monetised through your data. ChurchCMS is neither.
Free here means MIT-licensed. It means the full source code is on GitHub. It means you can self-host it, own your data completely, modify it for your context, and never pay anyone a monthly fee unless you choose to. If we at GegoSoft ever shut down, the software doesn’t disappear. It’s yours.
For churches, particularly smaller congregations that have been squeezed by the subscription model that dominates church tech, this is a genuinely different offer. The major platforms — Planning Center, Breeze, ChurchTrac — are well-built products. But they’re built on a model where you rent access to software you never own, and the price tends to go up over time.
ChurchCMS is built on a different premise: the software belongs to the churches that use it.
What This Means for GegoSoft
We’re a small team. We’re not trying to become the next Salesforce. What we’re trying to do is build something genuinely useful for churches around the world — particularly the ones that the mainstream church tech industry has priced out or ignored — and run a sustainable services business around maintaining and extending it.
The open-source model makes that possible in a way the SaaS model didn’t. It gets the software into the hands of the people who need it without a financial barrier. It builds a global community of developers who improve the product. And it creates a natural pipeline for services from the churches and developers who want professional support on top of the free foundation.
Looking back, the pivot was the right decision. Not because the commercial model was a failure — it taught us a great deal about what churches actually need — but because what we were building deserved a wider reach than a subscription model would ever give it.
If you’re a church looking for free church management software, ChurchCMS is at [churchcms.app](https://churchcms.app). The software is free. If you want our help setting it up or running it, we’re here.