Church Dev

Jarod Thornton _{on Google}

Jun 4th, 2023

We have been using ChurchDev for our website and hosting for a couple of years now. We are paying $29 per month for the DIY plan, which seemed like a good deal at first. However, we soon found out that this plan does not allow us to make any changes to the design or extend the functionality of our website in any way.
The only way to do so is by paying extra money to ChurchDev, but even then they don't give you access to the work you pay them for. We had also uploaded audio, photos and text files of our sermons on our website. When we asked ChurchDev for a backup of all these files, they told us that they don't provide it.
Furthermore, when we asked them if we could migrate our website somewhere else, they refused as well. This was very disappointing as their interface is built on WordPress, so it can be migrated easily(!) and despite being a faith-based company (it seems) serving faith-based organizations, they still refused to provide us with a backup of our content or website design, in bad faith!
When I chatted with Daniel (the owner I believe) on the support forum and Angela on the phone about this issue, both were quite short-toned and unhelpful about it. They seemed annoyed we would ask about these things. They don't mention anything about these issues in their TOS either.
All in all, it has been an extremely dissatisfying experience working with ChurchDev and I would not recommend them to anyone looking for web hosting services or design for their church.
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Someone from ChurchDev responded to my review, but Angela clearly stated we would need our own backups of the sermon audio files as they did not provide us with any means otherwise.
I believe we've spent ~$700 for the DIY site month-to-month, so free setup etc, this company isn't interested in helping if you decide to move to another provider.
They responded to a negative review, but haven't reached out to us directly to mitigate the situation.

Bill Saxon _{on Google}

Aug 8th, 2020

Positive: Professionalism, Quality, Responsiveness, Value

Andrews Church of God _{on Google}

Sep 14th, 2018

We committed to change over our church website hosting to Church Dev and overall it has been a good decision. However, I do want to let you know that in our experience Angela and the design team has been slow to respond and never completed all my edit request. They claimed I closed the work order. However, I have no Idea how I did that and they couldn't give me the specifics as to why they were getting some of my edit request and not others. It is not worth the extra money. Also, during the design process, they still charge the monthly fees. That doesn't really make sense because my site wasn't live. They have good templates and an easy to use editing system, so do it yourself, save the extra money and don't bother with having them design it.