Church sermon hosting costs compared

Most sermon hosting plans look affordable when you first sign up, but the monthly fee often hides the true cost of scaling.

Because your sermon library grows every week, your storage needs—and your bill—will likely increase significantly as your archives age.

Before you choose a platform, it’s critical to understand how different services handle long-term storage, as this is often where the real costs live.

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What a year of sermons weighs

Run the math once and every pricing page gets easier to read.

A one-hour service encoded at 3,000 Kbps produces a file around 1.3 GB. Stream one service a week for a year and you’ve added roughly 67 GB.

Add a second Sunday service and a Wednesday night. Now you’re closer to 200 GB a year.

Keep that up for a decade and you’re managing about 2 TB of video, which is more than most churches realize they own until someone asks why the invoice changed. Encode at 1080p60 and 6 Mbps instead, and those numbers roughly double.

So when a plan advertises 100 GB, that’s about eighteen months of a single weekly service. No midweek teaching. Which doesn’t include any youth series, conference sessions, funerals and other events.

Sermon hosting prices and storage limits compared

Costs are pulled August 2026, please verify with vendors before making any purchasing decisions.

Resi

Resi sells streaming and storage as two products, and that’s the reason it works for churches of almost any size.

Resi On Demand is $49 a month for 1 TB of permanent storage. Run that against the math above and 1 TB holds roughly 769 hours of 1080p video, or about fifteen years of a single weekly service.

Views are unlimited and there’s no monthly bandwidth ceiling on it. So a Christmas Eve message that gets shared for three weeks straight doesn’t put you into an overage conversation.

Step up to $99 and you get 7 TB plus Media Sites, which is your own branded video library rather than a page inside someone else’s directory.

Now the live side. Those plans start at $99 a month and are built around the Resilient Streaming Protocol, which is the part that keeps the stream up when your church’s upload speed dips at 10:15 on a Sunday morning.

Live plans hold recordings temporarily: seven days on Social Only and Starter Lite, thirty on Pro and Enterprise. That’s deliberate, since they’re engineered for delivery rather than archiving.

So yes, a church that wants both bulletproof Sunday delivery and a permanent searchable library is buying two things.

The upside of that split is you only pay for the half you need. Already happy streaming to YouTube? Buy On Demand on its own for $49 and leave it there. Need reliability more than archive depth? Start with a live plan and add storage later.

SermonAudio

SermonAudio offers one flat monthly fee, no storage ceiling, no bandwidth metering.

It also sits on a catalog of more than 2.7 million sermons that people actually browse, which is the real product if discoverability matters to you.

Churches consistently report visitors finding them through SermonAudio before they ever find the church website.

The catch is control. You’re publishing into someone else’s directory, with their design and their doctrinal statement gating who gets in.

If you want a branded media page that matches your own site, it’s a limit.

Subsplash

Subsplash publishes $0/month for standalone Giving and quotes everything else. The app, website, and media pieces get bundled into Subsplash One and priced on church size and usage.

Third-party pricing trackers put most churches between $300 and $2,000 a month, with mid-sized churches landing around $600 to $1,200 once apps, media, and push notifications are bundled in.

Media storage allowances aren’t published, which means they’re negotiable.

Get the specific number in writing before you sign, and ask what happens when you exceed it.

Vimeo and Wistia

Neither was built for churches, and that cuts both ways.

Vimeo Standard gives you 2 TB for $25 a month billed annually.

That’s an absurd amount of storage for the price compared to anything church-specific.

The catch is the 2 TB monthly bandwidth ceiling, which a church with a genuinely large online audience can hit.

Wistia changed shape in March 2026. Plus and Pro are gone, replaced by Free at 25 GB, Business at $79 a month annually with 250 GB, then Enterprise. If you researched Wistia more than six months ago, your notes are out-of-date.

Neither one gives you sermon metadata, scripture tagging, series organization, or a church app integration. You’d be building that yourself.

Sermon.net

Sermon.net prices by the gigabyte, which makes it the easiest platform to model against your own math.

Plans run $9 for 10 GB, $20 for 25 GB, $38 for 100 GB, $70 for 300 GB, and $140 for 750 GB.

Every plan includes every feature, so the only decision is capacity.

Overages run $1/GB on Audio Only and drop to $0.25/GB at Enterprise. You can also turn off server-side recording, or capture audio only, if you want to stream without accumulating storage cost.

Where the bill grows later

BoxCast deserves a specific walkthrough. Not because its policy is unusual, but because it’s unusually transparent about something most platforms do in some form.

The Standard plan includes 90 days of storage.

After that, each broadcast bills at $0.49 per broadcast hour, per month, for as long as you keep it.

Five years of weekly one-hour services is 260 hours.

At $0.49, that’s about $127 a month in storage charges sitting on top of your $109 plan.

Auto-Bill is the default when you subscribe. So this accrues quietly unless someone switches the setting to Auto-Delete or exports and deletes broadcasts by hand.

Nobody finds this in month three. They find it in year four, when a finance volunteer flags a line item nobody recognizes.

Compare that to a fixed-tier archive. Resi On Demand at $49 for 1 TB costs the same in year six as it does in month one, because you’re buying capacity rather than renting time on each file.

Two other things to check. Live-stream storage and archive storage are frequently separate products with separate prices, and a demo will rarely draw that line for you.

And app add-ons carry their own storage math in a different unit entirely. BoxCast’s OTT tiers run $25 to $200 a month and include 50 to 150 hours of video, which you can’t compare to a GB figure without doing the conversion yourself.

Is YouTube good enough?

It’s free, storage is effectively unlimited, and it’s the second-largest search engine on earth.

If your goal is reach and your budget is zero, hosting sermons on YouTube is a defensible decision.

The costs are real but indirect. You don’t control the recommended-video sidebar, which is a genuine pastoral concern for some congregations.

You get channel-level analytics rather than viewer-level insight into who’s engaging with your teaching.

Content strikes on worship music happen, and appeals take days.

And you can’t tie playback into a church app or connect viewing behavior to your ChMS records. That matters if you’re trying to work out whether online attenders are connecting anywhere else.

Plenty of churches run YouTube as a distribution channel alongside a hosted archive that serves as the system of record. Two tools, two jobs.

That’s the cheapest version of this setup, by the way. Keep publishing to YouTube for reach and put $49 a month behind Resi On Demand so the archive you actually own lives somewhere you control.

3 ways to match a plan to your church

Small church, light archive

SermonAudio’s flat fee or Sermon.net’s $20 Starter plan covers you.

If you’d rather never think about capacity again, Resi On Demand Starter is $49 for 1 TB, which is about fifteen years of runway at one service a week.

The decision comes down to whether you want to be findable inside a large directory or want your own branded page.

Don’t buy a 7 TB tier for 25 GB of content.

Weekly video, growing library

This is where storage caps start biting inside eighteen months.

You want either uncapped storage or room at the 1 TB level, and you want to know the overage rate before you need it. Sermon.net’s Growing plan at $38 for 100 GB fits a single weekly service for about a year and a half. Resi On Demand at $49 for 1 TB buys a much longer runway for eleven more dollars.

If you’re adding a second service or a midweek stream this year, price the tier above the one you think you need.

Multisite or video-heavy

At this scale, per-GB pricing and bandwidth ceilings both matter.

Resi On Demand Enterprise is $199 for 15 TB and 10 Media Sites, so each campus can have its own branded library off one account. Resi Multisite handles the video delivery between campuses from $499.

Quote-based platforms are worth the conversation too, because volume gives you room to negotiate.

Get the storage allowance and the overage rate written into the agreement.

FAQ

Is SermonAudio free for listeners?

Yes. Listeners access sermons, apps, and live webcasts at no cost. The broadcaster church pays the monthly fee, which is why the platform’s flat rate works out well for churches with large online audiences.

Which platform includes the most storage?

Among published plans, Resi On Demand Enterprise at 15 TB and Vimeo Advanced at 7 TB lead on raw capacity. SermonAudio sidesteps the question with no cap at all. Its model is built around sermon audio and video rather than general media hosting, so it’s not a like-for-like comparison.

Can I use Resi just for hosting, without the streaming plan?

Yes. Resi On Demand is its own plan family, starting at $49 a month for 1 TB, and it works whether your live stream runs through Resi or somewhere else. You get unlimited views, a white-labeled player, and analytics on the storage plan alone. Media Sites and 7 TB arrive at $99.

Which option is best for a long-term searchable archive?

Anything that charges monthly per hour of aged video will punish a permanent archive, so start by ruling those out. Look for uncapped storage or a fixed large tier. Then confirm the platform indexes sermons by series, speaker, and scripture reference, because a 4,000-file library nobody can search isn’t an archive.

How do I estimate what I need?

Take your weekly service count, multiply by 1.3 GB per hour at 1080p, multiply by 52, then multiply by the years you intend to keep everything. Compare that to the plan cap. If you exceed the cap inside three years, you’re shopping the wrong tier.

What’s the difference between live-stream storage and archive storage?

Live-stream storage holds a recording for a set window after the broadcast, usually 7 to 90 days, so viewers can catch up. Archive storage keeps it permanently. Several platforms sell these separately, which means two line items rather than one, so check which you’re actually buying.

Start with your storage math

Pull last year’s streaming invoices and add up every line, including storage overages and app add-ons.

Then calculate what your library will weigh in three years at your current service count.

Compare both numbers against a flat-rate or large-tier plan.

If the three-year number is bigger than what you’re paying for today, Resi On Demand at $49 for 1 TB is the cheapest place to start looking. Do it before your renewal date, because that’s the only window where switching costs you nothing.