FaithKit brings together prayer, members, sermons, giving, and Scripture in one self-hosted system. Built from 18+ months at a real church. Owned by you, forever.
✓ AGPL open-source ✓ Self-hosted ✓ No accounts, no tracking
If three of these describe your week, FaithKit was built for you.
You don't need more software. You need software that fits how a small church actually works — and that you own outright.
Six tools your church actually uses, on a stack you actually own.
Submit anonymously, organize by category, and celebrate answered prayers together.
An organized directory with contact info, roles, and family groupings. Searchable, exportable, yours.
Upload, organize, and share sermons. A searchable archive your members can reach anytime.
Record contributions, track giving patterns, and generate year-end statements for your members.
The full Scripture text built in — searchable by reference, linkable from sermons, no third-party API.
Manage church events and volunteer shifts. Let members sign up and stay informed.
The things FaithKit deliberately leaves out
FaithKit is open-source. Download it once. Run it forever. The codebase is yours under the AGPL.
The software runs on your server. If FaithKit the project ever stops, your installation keeps running. Nothing depends on someone else's uptime.
Pastor, treasurer, volunteer coordinator, deacons — give an account to everyone who needs one. There is no per-seat anything.
Prayer + members + sermons + giving + Bible + events all ship together. There's only one app, and it has all of it.
FaithKit is a web app. Your phone, tablet, and laptop all see the same data. Add it to your home screen and it launches like a native app.
No contract — there's nothing to sign. You're running open-source software on your own hardware.
Four steps. About an hour. Or pay MattCreates to do it for you.
Grab the source from GitHub. git clone, npm install, copy the example .env. Standard Node project — nothing exotic.
⏱ 5 minutes
Set your church name, admin email, and a session secret in .env. Pick a port. SQLite handles the database — no Postgres setup required for MVP.
⏱ 10 minutes
npm start for local. PM2 or systemd for production. Reverse-proxy through nginx or Apache with a Let's Encrypt cert and you're done.
⏱ 30 minutes
Add members, post a prayer request, upload last week's sermon. The app is fully usable the moment it boots.
⏱ Game time
Not a developer? MattCreates does paid installs at $300/hour — but you never have to use that path. The source is yours either way.
What it actually looks like in practice
Mrs. Wilson texts the prayer line: her grandson is in surgery at 4 PM. The pastor's wife adds it to FaithKit from her phone — anonymous, urgent flag set. By 2:17 the prayer team's notification has gone out and three people have already responded "praying."
A Sunday visitor opens the directory link the greeter sent. He fills out his contact card from his phone, picks the parents' Sunday school class, and selects "I'd like a follow-up call this week." The Discipleship Pastor sees it on his dashboard before he leaves the office.
The media volunteer drops Sunday's sermon MP3 into FaithKit, picks the series ("Sermon on the Mount"), pastes the outline, and hits publish. By 9:09 the sermon archive on the church site is updated.
Self-host it yourself, hire MattCreates for a guided install, or wait — three honest answers, one recommendation.
Question 1 of 3
Question 2 of 3
Question 3 of 3
Pick the inputs that match your church. Get a hosting recommendation + a 3-year cost estimate.
Members on the roll
Sermon archive
Where it lives
Recommended tier
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Numbers are conservative estimates based on May 2026 Pi/VPS pricing and a typical mid-tier hosted ChMS subscription. Your mileage will vary — but the order-of-magnitude difference won't.
Because that's where it belongs.
FaithKit runs on a server you control. Linode, DigitalOcean, a Raspberry Pi in the church office — wherever you point it. No vendor cloud. No one else's database.
Your prayer requests don't train a recommendation engine. Your member directory doesn't get sold to lead-gen brokers. There are zero third-party scripts in the application surface.
Members, prayer history, giving records, sermon metadata — every byte lives in a single SQLite file on your server. Back it up by copying one file. Read it with any tool.
The source code is published under the GNU AGPL. You can read it, modify it, fork it, share it with other churches. No part of FaithKit can be taken back.
FaithKit doesn't pick sides on doctrine, translation, polity, or worship style. It's a tool. You set the defaults.
FaithKit was built at an independent Baptist church. That's where the design decisions came from. But the tool itself is neutral — Methodist, Presbyterian, charismatic, and non-denominational churches can use it without conflict.
Software the church depends on shouldn't belong to a vendor. The promises below are the reason FaithKit exists as open source instead of a subscription product.
Every line of server, frontend, schema, and migration script is published. Your church can self-host the exact software, free, indefinitely. Fork it, modify it, share it with other churches — that's what the license is for.
FaithKit doesn't phone home, doesn't sync to a vendor cloud, doesn't depend on someone else's uptime. If we vanished tomorrow, your installation would keep running.
FaithKit is independently owned — no investors, no board, no quarterly growth pressure. There's nothing to acquire. The license guarantees the code stays free forever, even if the project changes hands.
If FaithKit helps your church, support the project with a donation. If you need professional installation, customization, or hosting help, MattCreates does that work at $300/hour. Neither one is required to use the software.
FaithKit was born from 18+ months of building church software at Landmark Baptist Church. I've seen the real problems churches face: complex platforms, confusing interfaces, expensive add-ons, software that doesn't match how you actually work — and vendors that can take it all away.
FaithKit is the opposite of that. Open source, self-hosted, owned by the church that runs it. Prayer requests. Members. Sermons. Giving. Scripture. Done right, on a stack you actually control.
This is church software built in the trenches, by someone who knows what it takes to serve a congregation well.
"Modern, intuitive, and built for real churches."
The church FaithKit was built inside. Every feature you see was shipped, broken, fixed, and re-shipped at a working congregation before it touched the public release.
"FaithKit was built FOR us, not retrofitted TO us. It runs on our server, the data is ours, and the source is on GitHub. That's not something you get from any vendor we evaluated."
FaithKit is free, open-source software. There's no subscription, no paywall, no tier. If it saves your church time and budget, here are two ways to give back.
A one-time or recurring donation that funds ongoing FaithKit development. Five dollars, fifty dollars, whatever your church can spare. Every dollar goes back into the project.
Donate via Buy Me a CoffeeOr email hello@faithkit.org for other ways to give.
If your church doesn't have a developer, MattCreates handles installation, customization, hosting, and training at $300/hour. A typical small-church install runs 4–8 hours including data migration.
Visit MattCreatesTravel-on-site engagements quoted separately. Email MEbersole@Gmail.com for a scoped quote.
Neither one is required. If you self-host FaithKit and never pay a dime — that's fine. The license is the license. Use it in good health.
Skip the form. Pick the channel that matches your question.
The things every church admin asks before downloading the code
Yes. FaithKit is open-source software released under the GNU AGPL. You can download it from GitHub, run it on your own server, modify it, and share it with other churches. There is no subscription, no tier, no paywall.
It doesn't, directly. FaithKit is a ministry project. If you find it useful, support it with a donation through Buy Me a Coffee. If your church needs help installing, customizing, or hosting FaithKit, that work is done through MattCreates at $300/hour — but you never have to pay anything to run the software itself.
Manage members, organize prayer requests, archive sermons, track giving, post events, and look up Scripture — all from a single web app you run on your own server.
Some. FaithKit is a Node.js application with a SQLite database. If you (or someone in your church) can install Node and run a command in a terminal, you can host FaithKit. If not, MattCreates offers paid installation and hosting help at $300/hour.
Yes — because it lives on your server, not ours. Member directories, prayer requests, and giving records sit in a SQLite file on the machine you install FaithKit on. No data leaves your network unless you explicitly connect a third-party service.
Yes. FaithKit is a web app that works in any modern browser — phone, tablet, laptop, or desktop. Add it to your phone's home screen and it launches like a native app.
The repository is being published on GitHub. Email hello@faithkit.org and we'll send you the link the moment it's public.
Matt Ebersole, a digital infrastructure consultant in Greer, SC. FaithKit was built over 18+ months while running the same software at Landmark Baptist Church. It's an independent project — no investors, no VC pressure, no board demanding feature creep. Just church software built by someone who knows what churches need.