Questions, answered plainly

A guided setup walks you through it one step at a time: connect Planning Center or drop in a spreadsheet and your people, teams, and services come with you. E.Z., the assistant built into Ezra, then walks you through publishing your first schedule.

Every plan starts with a 14-day free trial and no credit card. That is two full Sundays of real scheduling with every feature unlocked. When the trial ends the workspace becomes read-only until you pick a plan: nothing is deleted while you decide, everything stays viewable and exportable, and access returns the moment you subscribe.

No. Every serving invitation text or email carries a secure link that opens a simple page where the volunteer taps Confirm or Decline — no account, no login, no app. Those who want more get a free volunteer portal with their upcoming schedule, availability, blackout dates, and swap requests.

Yes. Ezra is a responsive web app that runs in any modern browser, and every section is reachable from a phone. There is nothing to install and nothing to update.

Yes. The 14-day free trial is the real product with your own church's data, no credit card, and a step-by-step guided setup. Prefer a guided look first? Email hello@ezraos.co and we will walk you through Ezra live.

Count your average Sunday. Up to 150 in weekly attendance is Small church at $49 a month, up to 500 is Mid-size at $99, and beyond that Large church at $149. Every plan includes every feature; plans differ only in size: weekly attendance, volunteers, and the monthly texting allowance.

You upgrade in two clicks and it takes effect immediately. Nothing to migrate and nothing to reconfigure, because every plan is already the whole product.

No. Monthly plans cancel any time from Settings, effective at the end of the billing period, and you can export all of your data first. Annual plans simply are not renewed.

No. There are no setup fees, no charges per staff member or volunteer, and no feature paywalls. Texting (1,000–5,000 texts a month, sized by plan) and AI (1,000 messages a month) allowances are included in every plan.

Billing runs through Stripe. Card details never touch Ezra's servers, and you manage your plan, payment method, and invoices yourself from Settings. Paying annually gets you two months free.

Yes. We partner with church networks and planting organizations on special pricing. Email hello@ezraos.co and tell us about your churches.

Yes, for free. Connect your Planning Center account and Ezra brings over your people, teams, and services; you choose which sections Planning Center keeps driving from then on, and those apply automatically while the rest waits for your review. If you would rather hand it off, email hello@ezraos.co and we will move your data for you.

Yes. Ezra imports directory, volunteer, and attendance spreadsheets exactly as they are, including messy exports from other systems. You will never be asked to rename a column or reformat a file: attach the spreadsheet in a chat with E.Z., review what it found, and confirm.

Your church does, unambiguously. Owners can export every record at any time as a single structured bundle: people, schedules, assignments, messages, the audit trail, and a manifest of uploaded files with their storage paths (file contents download separately, so the bundle stays usable).

You take it with you. Export everything from Settings, then an owner can permanently delete the workspace. Deletion removes every record and uploaded file, is verified after it runs, and is recorded in a deletion ledger so it stays accountable.

Your records are kept for as long as your church uses Ezra. A monthly job removes message bodies and audit entries older than 24 months, and read notifications older than 6 months. Individual people can ask your church to erase their records: a one-step admin tool deletes their profile, messages, follow-ups, and uploaded files, and scrubs their name from audit history. The Privacy page spells out exactly what it covers and its limits.

Yes, self-serve. Connect with one click through Planning Center's own sign-in, or paste a personal access token into the guided form in Settings; either way the credentials are verified live before saving and stored encrypted with AES-256-GCM. The sync covers people, teams, and services.

Not yet — private read-only calendar feeds are built and in final testing, and the Integrations page in Settings will light them up when they ship. Until then, Planning Center sync and spreadsheet import cover getting your services in.

Yes, texting is built in on every plan: 1,000 texts a month on Small church, 3,000 on Mid-size, and 5,000 on Large, where each recipient of a message counts as one text. Volunteers who reply STOP are opted out automatically and permanently, and when texting is off, notifications fall back to email.

Not yet. Every plan includes full structured data exports, and the Planning Center sync covers the most common integration need. If a missing integration is blocking your church, email us; pilot churches shape the roadmap directly.

E.Z. (pronounced "easy") is the assistant built into Ezra. It drafts schedules, imports spreadsheets, drafts guest follow-up messages, answers questions about your ministry, and opens every conversation with what actually needs attention, so the least technical person on staff never has to know what to ask.

No. Anything E.Z. wants to do becomes a proposal that a staff member reviews and confirms first. Confirmed actions run through exactly the same permission checks as clicking in the interface, and every one lands in the audit trail.

No. E.Z. runs on Anthropic's commercial API. Under Anthropic's commercial terms, what your church types and what E.Z. returns are not used to train Anthropic's models. Anthropic deletes API inputs and outputs from its systems within 30 days under its standard retention policy, longer only where its policies or the law require it; prompt caching keeps the shared parts of a request in a short-lived cache, normally five minutes, to reduce cost. We also never use protected characteristics in scheduling suggestions.

No. Prayer requests, children's information, and pastoral notes are never passed to E.Z., whatever the signed-in person's role; staff with the dedicated permission record and read them on the guest or volunteer page. For everything else, E.Z. sees only what that person is allowed to see: it inherits your church's role permissions rather than bypassing them.

Every plan includes 1,000 AI messages a month, shared across your whole team. In practice that is a healthy month of daily use; if your church needs more, talk to us.

Every church is isolated by row-level security enforced by the database itself, not just the application. Traffic is encrypted in transit, data is encrypted at rest, integration credentials get an additional AES-256-GCM layer, and an automated security test suite probes the tenant boundary on every change. The full list of controls is on our Security page.

Access follows the roles your church assigns, enforced at the database layer on every read and write. Volunteers see only their own serving information, and uploaded files are never served publicly.

Never. We never sell data, never advertise to your members, and our error monitoring scrubs names, message bodies, prayer requests, emails, and phone numbers before anything leaves our servers.

Not yet. We are honest about that instead of hiding it: an automated security test suite probes tenant isolation and every role's permissions on each change, internal security reviews are run and remediated continuously, an independent external review is on our roadmap before wider rollout, and the concrete controls are published on our Security page for your board to review.

Email support@ezraos.co with enough detail to reproduce it. We acknowledge within two business days, keep you informed, and never take legal action against good-faith research.

Priority email support on every plan, answered by the team that builds Ezra: support@ezraos.co. We answer privacy and security questions from church leadership directly, and data migration help is always free.

Yes. We will move your data for free, help you publish your first schedule, and check in through your first Sundays. Ezra only works if your church actually gets to Sunday with less chaos, so we stay until you do.