Pricing & Donations

Parish Record Keeper has two parts, and they are paid for differently. The program is free — we only appeal for a donation to the parish that made it. The Workspace, the optional online side of the program, carries a contribution towards the cost of the server. A diocese can pay that contribution for its parishes at a flat rate.

Parish Record Keeper was developed to support parish administration and record-keeping in the service of our common faith. Every download includes a free licence granting indefinite use of the current version. Nothing is disabled, time-limited or locked behind a payment, and a donation is never a condition for using it.

If the program is useful to your parish, we do kindly ask you for a generous donation of your choice to Lumimba Parish in the Luangwa Valley, Zambia — the parish that created and continues to maintain this application. Developing and maintaining software involves real costs. Lumimba Parish covers a vast and remote area stretching over 150 km along the Luangwa River, where many villages become completely cut off during the rainy season. Your donation directly supports its outreach ministry, helping it reach even the most isolated families and communities, and its educational and health initiatives, including the construction of schools and a hospital.

We would be happy to tell you more about how your gift can make a difference. Write to us at administrator@parishrecordkeeper.com, or go straight to how to donate.

A Workspace is the whole online side of Parish Record Keeper, hired as one package for one datafile and for a term the parish chooses. It holds the shared master datafile that several people at the same parish work on in turn (with server-based version control of the master and of each member's copy to assist the merging), an account for each member, the online search, the offline phone apps, the parish transport register and shared logins for people with no account of their own. There is one contribution for the whole package, covering the direct costs of securing and maintaining it, with nothing inside it charged for separately. A longer term costs less per year:

The kwacha and dollar prices are set separately, not converted from one another: the kwacha price is the real price for a Zambian parish, the dollar price the real price for someone contributing from abroad.

Try it first. Ask the developer for a free-trial token: typed in where the program asks for an activation code, it sets up a Workspace free for six months, once per email address. A contribution before the six months are over keeps it, with everything in it.

You ask for a Workspace from inside the program (Server Actions), not on this website — see how to get access. The Workspace contribution is the only thing that is ever charged; the full terms are in the Cloud Service Agreement and Data Protection Policy.

A diocese may pay the Workspace contribution for its parishes in advance. It buys a bracket of places at one flat price for a term; each parish that joins the diocese with its join code takes a place and is paid for from its first day, at no cost to the parish.

• Spare places wait. A diocese may pay for more places than it has parishes; a parish that registers later takes one by itself, with nothing more to pay.
• One budget line, one date. Every parish on a place is paid for until the same day, so the office renews once rather than chasing separate dates.
• A lower rate. A filled bracket of 60 over 3 years works out at about USD 10.56 a parish-year, against the USD 20 a year a parish pays on its own.
• No parish is turned away. When the places are full, a parish still joins the diocese and simply contributes for itself.
• A place is never taken back. If the diocese releases a parish or lets its term lapse, the parish keeps every day already given and contributes for itself after that.

A free trial for a diocese. Write to the developer and say how many parishes there are: the diocese is then given places for its parishes free for three months. When the trial ends the parishes simply go back to contributing for themselves — nothing is cancelled and nothing is owed.

The diocesan copies service itself costs nothing on top of the parishes' Workspaces. Dioceses are welcome to write to developer@parishrecordkeeper.com; see also Copies for the diocese.

Donations and Workspace contributions both go to Lumimba Parish, by any of the methods below. Anything beyond a Workspace contribution counts as a donation, so there is no need to send two payments: send one combined amount and say how it should be split.