Frequently asked questions

Three plans, all priced in hours of live service — the wall-clock time from when you press Start to when you press Stop, counted once no matter how many languages translate simultaneously. Starter is $29/mo for 6 hours and 2 translated languages. Growth is $59/mo for 12 hours and 4 translated languages — the plan most churches pick. Unlimited is $149/mo with no hour meter at all and 6 translated languages included (+$9.99/mo per extra language). On Starter and Growth, time past your included hours bills at a flat $3/hr.

Starter covers a church running one Sunday service a week — 4 Sundays at ~75 minutes each is 5 hours, inside the 6 included (a longer month simply bills $3 for each extra hour). Growth adds hours and languages for multi-service Sundays plus midweek gatherings. Unlimited removes the meter for churches running daily services, conferences, or multiple long events — and it unlocks the Live Interpreter (V1) engine alongside the default Natural Voice (V2). You can switch plans at any time from the Billing page.

Yes — every new church gets its first 4 hours of live service time free, with full platform access and nothing charged. That's typically two to four full Sunday services to validate the platform against your real congregation before money changes hands. The trial ends when you've used the 4 hours or after 14 days, whichever comes first — then your plan's normal monthly billing begins. Stripe collects a payment method at signup; the card-on-file is what lets billing start seamlessly when the trial ends, with no interruption mid-service. Running out of trial hours never cuts off a live service — it simply asks you to start your plan before the next one.

Take a typical small-to-mid church on Growth: two Sunday services — about 2.5 hours of service time a week — with 4 translated languages live during each service.

Monthly bill:
• $59 base (12 hours + 4 languages included) → $59.00
• Service time: 2.5 hrs × 4 weeks = 10 hrs — inside the 12 included → $0.00
Total: $59.00/mo

Note: all 4 languages translate at the same time and the hours count once — a 90-minute service uses 1.5 hours whether one language is live or all of them.

Growth covers 12 hours; past that you pay $3/hr. The math crosses over at 42 hours a month ($59 + 30 overage hrs × $3 = $149) — but most churches pick Unlimited for the other reasons first: it includes 6 translated languages (Growth caps at 4), removes the meter entirely for conference weeks and all-day events, and unlocks the Live Interpreter (V1) engine. If your schedule is long or unpredictable, Unlimited is the budget-certain choice. You can switch either way from the Billing page.

Nothing dramatic — translation never stops mid-service. On Starter and Growth, time past your included hours simply bills at a flat $3/hr, prorated to the minute, on your next invoice. We email you when you've used about 80% of your bundle so the overage never comes as a surprise, and the Billing page shows your hours in real time. If you're regularly going over, upgrading to the next plan is usually cheaper — one click from the dashboard. Unlimited has no meter, so none of this applies there.

No. Captions in your speaker's language (your source language) are free and always included on every plan — they're generated as a side-effect of the translation pipeline anyway. When a plan says it "includes N translated languages," that counts the output languages — so a Russian-source church translating to English + Spanish has 2 translated languages; an English-source church translating to Russian + Spanish also has 2. The source-language captions are bundled free on top.

Yes. Any listener can select the original language on their phone and get live captions of the service in the speaker's own words — no translation has to be involved at all. For the room, the on-screen captions page puts the same live text on a lobby TV, an in-room monitor, or a ProPresenter slide. Source-language captions are included on every plan, so this works even if nobody in your congregation needs a second language.

That's fine — pick any of 97 languages as your source during signup. Whatever your speaker preaches in becomes the "original": listeners see captions in that language and can pick from any translation languages you've enabled (English, Spanish, Mandarin — whatever your congregation needs). Common patterns we already support: Russian-speaking congregations needing English / Ukrainian for second-gen attendees; Spanish-speaking congregations needing English for non-Hispanic guests; Korean-speaking congregations with English-only spouses. The AI auto-detects your speaker's words — you just tell us once during onboarding which language they preach in, so we label the captions correctly and bill the right languages as "translations."

97 languages with Natural Voice (V2) — our default and the engine most churches use — each one fully supported as both a source and a target, from Spanish, Korean, and Mandarin to Amharic, Punjabi, and Zulu. Churches on the Unlimited plan can also use our Live Interpreter (V1) engine with its 13 officially supported languages — English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Japanese, Korean, Chinese, Russian, Hindi, Indonesian, Vietnamese. Add or drop any language from the dashboard at any time.

Accuracy on doctrinal speech is generally very good. The default Natural Voice (V2) engine treats all 97 languages as first-class — no quality tiers. On the optional Live Interpreter (V1) engine, quality is strongest across its 13 officially supported languages. The model handles scriptural references (book chapter:verse), proper nouns (your pastor's name), and church-specific terminology ("the elders," "communion," "the body of Christ") better than older cascade translators. Like all current AI, it sometimes chooses imperfect words on edge cases — listeners can toggle a secondary subtitle that shows the speaker's original language alongside the translation for cross-reference.

Not yet. Today's live translation engines don't accept per-church custom guidance, so we don't offer a glossary feature we can't honestly deliver. In practice the engines already handle names, places, and Scripture references well. If a specific term keeps coming out wrong, email help@churchtranslator.ai — we track these for when engine support lands.

It depends which engine you're on. Natural Voice (V2) — the default, and the only engine on Starter and Growth — starts playing in your visitor's language about three seconds behind the speaker. Live Interpreter (V1), included on Unlimited, runs under a second behind and mirrors the speaker's own voice, about as fast as a human interpreter. Either way the AI translates into every one of your languages at the same time, and we measure end to end (audio captured at your booth, through the AI, back out to the phone), not in a lab.

Audio playback gracefully degrades — listeners may hear a few-second gap, then catch up. We never drop translated content; it queues server-side. If the capture Mac loses internet entirely, our dashboard alerts the operator and displays a "temporary outage" banner on the listener page so visitors know to wait rather than assume their phone is broken.

About 15 minutes for the first service. Download our Mac capture app from the dashboard, pair it with your account, plug your audio interface's output into the Mac (USB or built-in line-in is fine). Print one QR code from the dashboard. That's it — your listeners scan, pick a language, and start hearing the translation. We don't need to talk to your sound system vendor; we just need an audio source.

One Mac (anything from the last 5 years works — M-series preferred but Intel Macs are fine for capture). A way to get sermon audio into that Mac: a USB audio interface, line-in, or even a clean Bluetooth feed in a pinch. A stable internet connection (~1 Mbps upload is plenty; we use Opus compression at the edge).

No. The listener experience is a web page — they scan the QR code, pick their language, tap play. Works on every iPhone and Android made in the last 5 years, plus iPads and laptops. No app store install, no permissions besides audio playback, no account creation.

Translation audio is processed in real time and not retained by default — once a segment is delivered to listeners it's discarded server-side. We keep aggregate usage metrics (service hours, listener counts) for billing. Full sermon recording is an opt-in tenant feature for churches that want their own archive; talk to us if you want that turned on.

No. The listener page asks nothing beyond which language to play.

Audio flows through our infrastructure on Fly.io (translation, capture endpoints) and our real-time translation engine (Translation V1 or Translation V2, your church's choice). Both operate under terms that don't train on this audio. See our privacy policy for the full picture.

Yes, any time from the dashboard's Languages page. Starter includes 2 translated languages and Growth 4 — swap them freely, no charge. Unlimited includes 6, and each language beyond that is $9.99/mo; adding or removing one mid-cycle is prorated automatically by Stripe, and you see the credit/charge on your next invoice. No support ticket needed.

Yes — one click from the Billing page. The dashboard shows the exact changes + projected new monthly cost before you confirm. Upgrades take effect immediately (your included hours bump right away, and Stripe prorates the difference on your next invoice). Downgrades take effect at the end of your current billing period, so you keep the hours and languages you already paid for until then.

Open the Stripe Customer Portal from the Billing page and click Cancel. Translation service stays live until the end of your current billing cycle; after that, listener URLs return a friendly "not active" page. No cancellation fee, no minimum term.

The listener page detects the audio gap and shows a "reconnecting" status. If you (or another admin) opt in to operational alerts on the Notifications page, you also get an email within seconds of the disconnect. Re-open the capture app and translation resumes immediately — no listener has to refresh.

One subscription = one tenant = one set of language slots + one capture stream. Multi-campus typically means multiple tenants. We're working on a multi-campus consolidated billing flow; today, email us if you have this case and we'll set it up by hand.

Yes — Custom Domain is built in. Set the hostname in the dashboard, add a CNAME at your DNS provider, click Verify. Free TLS via Cloudflare. Walkthrough takes about 5 minutes; DNS propagation 1–10 minutes.

Hours are wall-clock time from Start to Stop, so a forgotten stream would keep the clock running — which is exactly why several layers bound the worst case:

1. Mac app 4-hour prompt. After 4 hours of continuous streaming the capture app pops up "Still capturing?" with a Stop button. Services rarely last that long, so this catches the "forgot after the service" case before anything serious happens.

2. API 5-hour hard stop. If the prompt is dismissed or missed, the API force-closes the stream at exactly 5 hours and tells the Mac app not to reconnect — so a single forgotten session can never run longer than 5 hours, no matter what.

3. 80% bundle warning. On Starter and Growth we email you when you've used about 80% of your included hours, so unusual usage surfaces before it costs anything.

4. Flat, capped overage. Even past your included hours, the rate is a flat $3/hr — combined with the 5-hour stop, one forgotten Sunday costs at most a few dollars, not a surprise bill.

A forgotten stream is force-stopped at 5 hours. On Starter or Growth, even if all 5 of those hours landed beyond your included bundle, that's 5 × $3 = $15 of accidental overage — and you'd have received the 80%-of-bundle warning email well before. On Unlimited it costs nothing at all. There is no per-listener or per-language multiplier: hours count once no matter how many languages are live.

A standard macOS alert: "Still capturing? This stream has been running for 4 hours. Most services don't last that long — if your service is over, click Stop to end the session. Otherwise we'll automatically stop at 5 hours to avoid running up charges." Two buttons: Stop streaming (ends the session cleanly) or Yes, keep going (resets the 4-hour timer for another block — useful for all-day events).

Yes — on Starter and Growth you get an email when you've used about 80% of your included hours for the month. The dashboard's Billing page also shows your month-to-date service hours in real time so you can self-check at any moment. A daily usage-summary email ("your church streamed X hrs yesterday") is on the roadmap; email help@churchtranslator.ai if you want that turned on for your tenant in advance of the general release.