Website or web app?
It is the question that decides the shape and the cost of a project, and most people are never asked it plainly. The short version:
- A website tells people things. Who you are, what you sell, when you are open, how to reach you. The content changes occasionally. Everyone sees roughly the same thing.
- A web app lets people do things. It holds data, it knows who is signed in, and what you see depends on who you are and what has happened. It replaces a spreadsheet, a group chat, a clipboard, or all three.
A congregation's public face is a website. Its actual weekly operation is an app. Pleasant View needed the second, and no off-the-shelf church product covered what they actually do.
What we built
Olive Leaf is the app. It runs on a phone, because that is where everyone in a congregation actually is.
The directory
Members, viewable as a list or on a map, filterable by role, with invitations and an export. This is the piece most organisations are running on a photocopied sheet that went out of date in the spring.
The calendar, and the readings
Services and events in one place, with Sunday morning and evening times, plus the daily reading and the week's lesson. There is also a full-year .ics export — which sounds like a technical footnote until you learn the church prints a paper calendar every year and used to assemble it by hand.
Potluck planning
A real, recurring, genuinely annoying coordination problem — who is bringing what — with active and archived events. This is the sort of thing that never appears in a product brochure and is used every single month.
Hospitality and host placement
The feature that best explains why this could not be bought off a shelf. When people travel in for meetings, families offer to host and visitors need somewhere to stay. The app collects both sides and works out the placement — so a visitor can open their phone and answer the only question they care about: where am I staying?
Every organisation has one of these. A process everybody knows, nobody has written down, and no software company has ever heard of. It is usually the highest-value thing you can build, and it is always the thing a template cannot do.
Roles, elections and reports
Church positions with terms and election status, polls and nominations, a school-year projection, shared documents and forms. Administrative work that was previously somebody's private spreadsheet, now visible to the people who need it and nobody else.
What made it work
- Phone first, genuinely. Not a desktop layout that survives on a phone — a phone layout. The people using this are standing in a car park after a service.
- Permissions that match how the organisation really works. Roles are not decoration; who can see and edit what is the difference between an app a congregation trusts and one it quietly abandons.
- Nothing that needs us to run it. Events, readings, documents and members are all maintained in-house. We are not a dependency for ordinary weekly operation.
Does your business have one of these?
The tell is a spreadsheet that more than one person edits, or a process that only works because one particular person remembers it. Scheduling, quoting, stock, dispatch, who-is-doing-what-on-Thursday.
Custom web apps start at $1,499 — see the pricing guide for how that compares with a website, and what pushes a project from one to the other.