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Hard to believe, but I've been working on this Rails app for over 7 years now! It started as a Rails 1.0 app waaayyy back when, and I've managed to bring it alo

• toni 12y ago
  The screenshots look extremely polished. Good work! Is there anything specific that makes this a social network specially for churches? Maybe you should emphasize those points a little bit more? From 3 features listed in main page ("Directory", "Profiles" and "Groups"), only the screenshot for "Groups" contains something that makes me believe this is tailored at churches ("Prayer Request"). As I said you did a good job, just trying to give you constructive criticism :)
  • timmorgan 12y ago
    Groups is the main one, sure (it has "prayer requests"), but also attendance tracking, sync without outside church management systems, etc. I probably should highlight more of that stuff on the site... thanks!
    • bencollier49 12y ago
      Attendance tracking is a thing? That sounds nightmarish!
      • deleted 12y ago
        [deleted]
      • netghost 12y ago
        At a guess it's probably tracking aggregate attendance, ie: 60 people were at this service. Like page views in google analytics.
        • baddox 12y ago
          That's pretty common in churches. Each Sunday school group will submit a number, and someone will count attendance during the main joined service. The totals will be published in the next week's bulletin, along with total contributions from the week and perhaps year-to-date contributions. Some churches even announce those attendance numbers and compare them to the same week one year ago.
      • tjr 12y ago
        I don't know every conceivable reason why a church would track attendance, but one reason: churches that use / sing "cover songs" (i.e., not public domain, not original compositions) need to pay licensing for the songs, and one of the variables on how much the licensing costs is the average number of people in attendance. [EDIT: https://us.ccli.com/licenses-and-services/church-copyright-license/ccl-single/#pricing https://us.ccli.com/licenses-and-services/church-copyright-l... ]
      • timmorgan 12y ago
        It's used primarily by small groups that meet in homes or whatever - that way the church as a whole can engage with anyone who stops attending (sometimes sign of personal/life issues that the church should be there to help with).
        • bencollier49 12y ago
          Genuinely fascinated by this. Wouldn't the members of the small group notice that someone had stopped turning up and drop them a line? Or does customer retention go up to corporate like a sort of Comcast "I want to cancel my contract" call?
          • timmorgan 12y ago
            Well, yes the small group itself should notice and act, but it's also nice to have an overall picture of the health of your small groups and class participation. We have an "Involvement Minister" who watches churn rate so to speak, so hopefully he can help organize better/different small groups or help improve existing ones.
      • swasheck 12y ago
        it is difficult. there are a few legitimate reasons and at least one questionable reason i can think of off the top of my head. attendance tracking would be good for "care" ("hey - it's been a while, is everything ok?"), for decision-making ("we average 35 people at 8am but 400 at 10:30am, what should we do?"). unfortunately, i can also see it used to target "marketing" messages for donations.
    • kpapke 12y ago
      Great work Tim! Can you elaborate more on some things and see if I can use your app to replace some of our current tools? My church as a whole is actually using http://www.churchcommunitybuilder.com/ http://www.churchcommunitybuilder.com/ as a directory and it's not that fun to use, although some ministries within the church are more effective with it than others. I lead the digital video & post production team at my church and we are using a mix mash of Church Community Builder, Facebook group, Google mass email thread and an ugly spreadsheet to keep track of our volunteers attendance, schedule them and communicate the serving opportunities each week. How does the attendance tracking work in your app and would it work for something like this to track volunteers and schedule them to serve? One reason we have not moved off the CCB platform yet is they have a built in way for the church body to easily send online tithes & donations. Do you have any plans to work that in to your app? On a side note - I know Hillsong NYC is using this site http://get.planningcenteronline.com/ http://get.planningcenteronline.com/ for scheduling & announcements, and https://pushpay.com/ https://pushpay.com/ for payments. Thanks and again, great job with this!
      • timmorgan 12y ago
        I'm not very familiar with churchcommunitybuilder so I can't say. As for scheduling volunteer and such, you should definitely check out Planning Center Services app (that's what I work on for my day job) - it is by far the best app for that sort of thing. OneBody doesn't have any scheduling or giving stuff yet, sorry! About the only thing OneBody might do for you in your situation would be to help with emailing all your volunteers. You could put them in separate "Groups" (per time, service, whatever) and then email that group at once. Then you could track attendance in that after the fact.
• zerokarmaleft 12y ago
  Very nicely done...http://church.io http://church.io looks far better than any other option out there. In this case, I believe you are the inspiration. Keep up the great work!
• humanrebar 12y ago
  I've been talking to leaders in my church about the need for better organization and communication. I'll definitely check this out for our purposes. Thanks for posting it!
• atonse 12y ago
  Even though I'm not religious, this really looks wonderful. I'd be happy to recommend it to church-going coworkers and friends. Echoing zerokarmaleft, this time you are the inspiration.
• orn 12y ago
  This is great, not many people stick with something for that long. I will recommend to a friend.
• tcopeland 12y ago
  I recently had to do some data model changes on a Rails app which I've had running for about 6 years, some notes here: http://thomasleecopeland.com/2014/06/09/reorganizing-a-data-model.html http://thomasleecopeland.com/2014/06/09/reorganizing-a-data-... Church-related IT is an interesting challenge - not a lot of money to be spent, and what money there is usually gets directed towards tracking contributions. I was the IT guy for http://www.alexandriapres.org/ http://www.alexandriapres.org/ for a few years (mostly running backups and such) and we certainly had a grab bag of solutions to the problems that church.io is solving nicely.
  • jakespencer 12y ago
    Fellow PCA church sort-of IT guy here. Couldn't resist saying hi!
    • tcopeland 12y ago
      Greetings! When I was IT guy at APC I called a bunch of local churches and talked to their IT folks. Was interesting to see all the variety. And of course McClean Pres was the most professional of the bunch, makes sense because they have like 25 people on staff, they have a campus of buildings to maintain, etc.
• jamesgeck0 12y ago
  Very nice. I've been asked for church directory software recommendations more than once, and this is much better than other software I've seen.
• jasonkester 12y ago
  Why are you not charging money for this? At the very least, you should offer a hosted version of this (borrowing the wordpress.com/wordpress.org model would seem the best plan) so that non-technical churches could click a button and just have it magically spin up a website and start billing their card every month. Seems a bit silly looking in from the outside that you'd spend seven years building something that's clearly worth selling, then refuse to sell it. I wouldn't be surprised to see a few "church.io hosting" businesses spring up within a week if you don't build that option yourself.
  • humanrebar 12y ago
    There's nothing wrong with giving stuff away for free. Many small churches already have budget problems and phobia of change and technology. But offering a completely optional hosted version is a good idea for churches with more money than technical prowess.
    • hnriot 12y ago
      Vatican City the 18th wealthiest nation in the world per capita.
      • shortstuffsushi 12y ago
        The Vatican in no way represents the average. They're about as far an outlier as you're gonna find. The parent comment mentioned specifically small churches with low budget/tech-phobia as well.
        • hnriot 12y ago
          right, but the small churches are franchises just like Taco Bell. They all belong to a bigger church.
      • dragonwriter 12y ago
        > Vatican City the 18th wealthiest nation in the world per capita. Per capita stats for the State of Vatican City really don't tell much even about the wealth of the Catholic Church as a church. Its kind of live judging the wealth of the United States by dividing the assets of the federal treasury by the number of people who live in the White House and the US Naval Observatory.
• CoachRufus87 12y ago
  Very well done. Kudos!
• shortformblog 12y ago
  As someone with a lot of experience in the nonprofit space, I should point out that you would be able to take this over to membership groups that aren't specifically churches very easily. There are companies in the space that sell products like this to associations for tens of thousands of dollars. I realize your goals here are more altruistic in nature, and that's to be greatly respected, but it's certainly worth pointing out.
• davidcollantes 12y ago
  Tim, you built something amazing. It looks beautiful! Thank you.
• socalnate1 12y ago
  Tim, you should check out the folks at http://get.planningcenteronline.com http://get.planningcenteronline.com, they make RoR hosted church applications and seem like kindred spirits.
  • timmorgan 12y ago
    Hehe! I work for Planning Center! Our team is absolutely awesome, and the fact that they let me work on this stuff in my spare time is really neat.
• ernsheong 12y ago
  Hello from Malaysia! Thanks for the amazing effort and perseverance! We shall see if my church is interested!
• cafard 12y ago
  The guy at www.midwesternmac.com has something like that, for Catholic, and also specifically Jesuit organizations.
• EGreg 12y ago
  Tim, this is a great job! I was particularly interested because I'm working on a platform for uniting communities, including Churches. In fact one of our business developers is part of a megachurch, so we are hoping to have a very large community as a beta partner. Reach out to me if you'd like to discuss ideas back and forth -- we might be able to help you, and you might be able to help us. About charging or not charging, I would say this ... even open source projects need resources to attract others to the community, and especially to gain adoption. You still have to do sales in Churches, and market to them. Churches, just like other organizations, are run by people who are averse to just trying anything they come across, and you need to have a good onboarding process. In any case, if interested, you'll find my email at http://qbix.com/about http://qbix.com/about (I'm Greg on there)
• callmeed 12y ago
  Great job, Tim. Looks really solid. I really think you should team up with someone to offer hosted versions of this to churches (take the WordPress model). My church uses The City [0] which charges anywhere from $20 to hundreds of dollars a month. It works well but I definitely think there's room for others. Also, Zondervan acquired The City from the developer/Mars Hill (he was an Amazon engineer too IIRC). I also think it would be huge to let churches connect a Stripe account and add giving via cc. Anyway, I think this is awesome and I respect your passion. If you ever need help with anything, drop me a line. [0] http://www.onthecity.org/pricing/ http://www.onthecity.org/pricing/
  • jashmenn 12y ago
    Our church also uses The City and I'd say it's fine but not great. There's a lot of room for another startup in this space - I've considered it more than once. The problem for me, on a personal level, is that it's very hard to mix business and the church. On the one hand, the technology used in the church generally lags far behind what is available and there are real benefits to the church body by having tailored technology. On the other hand, sometimes the new tech doesn't fit for cultural reasons. For example, it still feels unsavory to, say, pass a square credit card reader along with the offering plate. Additionally, one has to be careful not to be in it merely for the money (which becomes harder as the organization scales). At the entrepreneur you're torn between fiduciary duty to your organization/employees/investors and the (greater) responsibility to God and his church. It's really hard to keep that balance. Jesus did turn over the tables of the money changers, after all. In an ideal world your employees/investors are aligned with your vision but in practice, it can get really cloudy. (And we haven't even talked about if you're willing to sell to other denominations yet which, presumably, are using your software as tool to spread an ideology you explicitly believe to be false.) One model I think could work is for software engineers to found a non-profit and essentially raise funding/customer commitments from larger churches in order to build the software that they'll eventually use. That said, it's hard enough to find engineers who are "good" in the industry at large, much less when you add in the qualification that they have to be so deeply ideologically in agreement with your vision.
    • 12y ago
• milesf 12y ago
  Beautiful work! Thanks Tim. That's quite a gift to release something like this.
• jfc 12y ago
  Nice UI and a comprehensive app. Congratulations on a job well done! My only thought is that small to mid-sized churches may not have a Rails specialist, so a hosted option would probably be very popular.
  • r-s 12y ago
    I highly doubt many large churches have Rails specialists either..
• clarkm 12y ago
  Congrats Tim -- you truly are a software evangelist! Do you have any idea how many churches currently use the software? Are many of them based in Tulsa?
  • timmorgan 12y ago
    Probably < 10, but it's hard to know. The software (older version) has been open source for a long time and I've had dozens of people interested in it in the past. I should have installed a tracking pixel or something ;-)
• shoover 12y ago
  Well done, sir. I've always thought something like this was needed. Paid products are fine, but why not open source if a person or crew wants to take the time to build it with the polish required to pull it off? Well, you built it and it looks awesome. Plus it's refreshing to see something seven years in the making and testing posted here. News and speculation are always interesting, but this project has some weight to it. Thanks for posting.
• Squarel 12y ago
  Very nice, not something for me, but I have passed the link onto relatives who are involved in churches.
• steve918 12y ago
  Awesome tim. I remember seeing this for the first time when I attended the Tulsa Ruby group. The one and only time I went to that particular meetup group ;-P
  • timmorgan 12y ago
    Steve! Yeah that seems like a long time ago... Hope you are well!
• pekk 12y ago
  > Being specifically church software, it might not find much of an audience here on HN After a huge pile of upvotes and comments, do you still want to believe that HN has some kind of anti-Christian bias?
  • timmorgan 12y ago
    Oh, I didn't mean at all that HN is anti-Christian. I just didn't think that church software (a very specific niche) was all that interesting to the HN crowd. I'm very pleased with all the support!
    • __m 12y ago
      If you can make money with it, people at HN will love it.
    • mst 12y ago
      That's how I read it, FWIW. OTOH, you can look at it this way - 'self hosted social network for X' is the sort of thing the HN crowd seems to enjoy - and you're just a relatively unusual value of X :)
• sbank 12y ago
  Really awesome work! Looks very polished and thorough.
• Cameron_D 12y ago
  I've been asked last month to rebuild my church website. I'm going to show them this and get their feedback on utilising it, it looks amazing!
  • timmorgan 12y ago
    OneBody is really more for your "members only" area of the site, not the visitor-focused website. I recommend Wordpress for that :-)
• philipn 12y ago
  I just wanted to say that I've been following your work for a while now. I find it really fascinating! You've got a really active niche (if you can really even call it that!) and an interesting, polished, open-source project. Also, you seem to really care about design, which is an unfortunate rarity in the FLOSS world. I agree with the folks saying you should start a SaSS service. Even if it's extremely un-optimized (e.g. you spin up a new EC2 instance per-order), I think many, many churches would be interested. Hosting is a huge liability, time-sink, and all-around pain in the ass, and I think you'd do well enough to at cover your costs (at the very least!)