Frequently asked questions

Two plans: Pay-As-You-Grow is $99/mo + $0.10 per translated minute — roughly $5 per sermon for a single language at typical Sunday use. Add more languages at $9.99/mo each. Flat Rate is a flat $199/mo that includes 20 hours of translation per language per month with overage at $9.99/hr; +$69/mo per extra language. Most churches start on Pay-As-You-Grow.

Variable-usage churches (mid-week services, occasional multilingual events, growing congregations) hate paying for capacity they don't use, so Pay-As-You-Grow charges only for minutes actually translated. Once you run roughly 15+ hours a month, Flat Rate becomes cheaper (it includes 20 hrs), more predictable, and easier to budget. You can switch either way at any time and Stripe prorates the change automatically.

Yes — every new church gets a 7-day free trial with full platform access. Stripe collects a payment method at signup, but the card isn't charged until day 7. You can cancel any time before then from the dashboard and you owe nothing. Card on file at signup is what lets us start translation immediately on Sunday without a billing-setup interruption mid-service.

Take a typical small-to-mid church on Pay-As-You-Grow with 2 Sunday services, 40-min sermon each, 3 translated languages active. On a given Sunday, language 1 has listeners the whole sermon, language 2 has someone briefly tune in for 6 min, and language 3 has no listeners at all.

Monthly bill:
• $99 base (1 language included) → $99.00
• 2 extra languages × $9.99 → $19.98
• Translation usage: (80 + 6) min × 4 Sundays × $0.10 → $34.40
Total: $153.38/mo

Note: we only translate a language when someone's actually listening. The unused language costs $0 in usage even though you're subscribed to it — and language 2 only cost 60¢ that month.

Roughly once you're consistently using 15+ hours of translation per language per month. Concrete example: a larger multilingual church with 4 Sunday services plus a Wednesday prayer + Saturday small group (~60 min each), 3 translated languages all actively listened to most of the time. That works out to ~3,500 translation minutes/mo across all languages.

• Same usage on Pay-As-You-Grow: $99 + $19.98 (2 extra langs) + $345.60 (3,456 min × $0.10) = ~$465/mo
• On Flat Rate: $199 + $138 (2 extra langs) = $337/mo flat, well within the 20 hrs/lang included

Flat Rate wins by ~$128/mo at this scale, plus you get a predictable invoice without watching the meter. You can switch either way from the Billing page and Stripe prorates automatically.

Yes, and we set sensible defaults so you never have to worry about it from day one. Every new Pay-As-You-Grow church signs up with a soft cap of $200/mo (warning) and a hard cap of $1,000/mo (hard stop). You can adjust both from the dashboard. The soft cap emails you when crossed; the hard cap refuses to open new translation streams once exceeded, so you can't accidentally rack up a four-figure bill. Flat Rate is flat rate so caps don't apply.

No. English captions are free and always included on both plans — they're generated as a side-effect of the translation pipeline anyway. The 1-language number in our pricing means "1 translated language," so English + Spanish counts as 1 translated language.

57 languages via OpenAI's gpt-realtime-translate model. The 13 most-trained — English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Japanese, Korean, Chinese, Russian, Hindi, Indonesian, Vietnamese — get the highest quality. The other 44 (Arabic, Polish, Swahili, Tamil, Greek, Hebrew, Turkish, Thai, etc.) are fully supported and sound great in most cases. Add or drop any language from the dashboard at any time; Stripe prorates.

Accuracy on doctrinal speech is generally very good in the top tier (English ↔ Spanish, English ↔ Korean, English ↔ Russian, English ↔ Portuguese) and good in the secondary tier. 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 — we let your listeners see English captions alongside their language for that reason.

Yes — we can upload church-specific terminology (pastor names, ministry names, recurring phrases) per tenant. Right now this is set up manually by our team during onboarding; self-serve glossary editing lands in v1.1. Email help@churchtranslator.ai with your list.

Less than one second from the pastor's mouth to your visitor's ear. By the time the pastor finishes a sentence, the translation is already playing in the visitor's language. That's about the same speed a human interpreter would be — except the AI does every supported language at the same time. We measure this end to end (audio captured at your booth, through the AI, back out to the phone) during real Sunday services, 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 (minutes per language, 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 OpenAI's real-time API (the AI model itself). OpenAI's enterprise terms apply to the data we send them; they don't train on this audio. See our privacy policy for the full picture.

Yes. Add or remove a language from the dashboard's Languages page and Stripe prorates the line-item change automatically — 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 line-item changes + projected new monthly cost before you confirm. Stripe handles the proration: credit for the unused portion of the old plan, charge for the new plan, netted on next invoice.

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.

Five layers of protection bound the worst case so a forgotten capture stream can't quietly run up a big bill:

1. Lazy translation streams. We only translate a language while at least one listener is actually subscribed to it. If everyone closes their phone, every upstream AI client closes within a short grace period — no audio gets sent to OpenAI, no per-minute charges accrue.

2. Speech gate (Silero VAD). Even when a language stream is open, every 100 ms of audio passes through a speech detector before reaching the AI. Silence, music, ambient HVAC noise, distant chatter below threshold — all gated out. In an empty sanctuary after the service, less than 5% of frames typically make it through.

3. Idle-listener eviction. Listener phones must ping the server every 25 seconds to stay connected. A backgrounded tab or a phone left on a pew that stops pinging is dropped within 25s, which closes the upstream translation client when the last listener on that language is gone.

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

5. API 5-hour hard cap. If the prompt is dismissed or missed, the API force-closes the ingest stream at exactly 5 hours and tells the Mac app not to reconnect. Together with the spend caps below, the absolute worst case from a forgotten Sunday morning is a few extra dollars.

Realistic worst case: operator forgets to stop, one phone is left on a pew, room has continuous HVAC noise so the speech gate passes ~30% of frames. At 5 hours × ~30% pass × $0.10/min × 1 language ≈ $9 of accidental usage, then the 5-hour cap kicks in. With three stuck languages it's closer to $25–$30. The hard cap (default $1,000/mo on PAYG) is the absolute ceiling even if something we haven't imagined goes wrong.

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 for the soft-cap warning: when month-to-date PAYG spend crosses your soft cap (default $200), you get an email. The dashboard's Billing page also shows real-time month-to-date AI Compute cost so you can self-check at any time. 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.