About
Churches in London, Sydney and Dallas have had proper tools for over a decade. A lot of churches here are still running Sunday on a spreadsheet only one person understands.
The established church-management products are genuinely good. They are also built for a different kind of church than most of the ones here — priced per person, shaped around large staff teams, and sold in pounds and dollars. For a congregation of a couple of hundred with two part-time staff and a lot of willing volunteers, they are heavy in every sense.
So the work still gets done by hand. The rota is rebuilt every month in a spreadsheet. Children are signed in on a clipboard, and the allergy list lives in someone’s head. A volunteer finds out they are serving when they arrive. None of it is anyone’s fault — it is what happens when the tools cost more than the problem.
ChapelHQ is deliberately smaller than the big products. It does the handful of things a church actually does every single week, it does them carefully, and it charges one price for the whole congregation rather than asking who you could remove to save money.
The check-in module gets more care than anything else here. Allergies follow the child onto a printed tag, in red, on the half the guardian keeps. Pickup is verified with a one-time code. Releasing a child to someone not on their list is possible — because sometimes it genuinely has to be — but it is recorded, by name, against the person who did it.
If an email fails to send, the screen says so instead of showing a green tick. If a rota is published but nobody could be notified, it says that plainly and stays published. Software that quietly reports success it did not achieve is more dangerous than software that does nothing.
People, attendance, giving and the children’s register all export to CSV from inside the app, without asking us. Every member can download their own record from their profile. We would rather you left easily than stayed because you were stuck.
No passwords to reset, nothing to install. Someone who opens it once a month should still manage — on their own phone, at the back of a hall, holding a toddler, in a hurry.
Churches of roughly 80 to 400 people, in Malaysia, running Sunday services, midweek groups and a children’s programme — with an office of one or two people and a lot of volunteers. If that is you, this was built with you in mind. If you are a 3,000-seat church with a full IT team, one of the bigger products will serve you better, and we’ll say so.
ChapelHQ is in pilot with a small number of churches in Malaysia. It is genuinely early — you will find rough edges, and they get fixed quickly because there are few enough of you that they can be. If you want polished and impersonal, there are bigger products. If you want a say in how this turns out, now is a good moment.