Why GLAD exists

My story

Twenty years ago I lost my spouse — my best friend. In the season I needed the church most, it turned a blind eye. When I reached for them, no one reached back.

I didn't set out to build software. I set out to make sure the next person drowning doesn't get silence. A church was never meant to be a building or a program — it's supposed to be the people who notice. When the systems a church runs on make it easier to overlook people than to love them, something is broken. So in 2024 I started building the tools I wish that church had had.

Today GLAD is a small business — and my livelihood. I'm all in. I'm writing this on almost no sleep, having just shipped a feature I couldn't wait another day to get in. Not because a roadmap told me to. Because it matters.

What I refuse to do

The legacy platforms run a playbook: get you subscribed, gate the features you actually need behind "premium" tiers you can't afford, and count on switching being such a headache that you just stay.

That's not a business model — it's a toll booth on ministry.

Churches exist to help people who can't always help themselves. Charging them a ransom to do it is backwards.

Software costs money to run — I'll always be honest about that. But you should never be squeezed for a premium just because a competitor made leaving painful.

So I made leaving painless — for the ones leaving them. When you decide to get out from under the greed, I will personally and securely migrate and merge your data myself. Not a support ticket. Not a paid "onboarding package." Me. The hardest part of switching should never be a wall someone built to trap you.

What we protect

The failures I've seen in churches traveled by whisper. So privacy here isn't a checkbox — it's personal.

Where we're going

Churches shouldn't be islands. We're building GLAD so churches can safely network — so when a big church runs VBS and a smaller church nearby wants to send their kids, the right information moves with them, under the right roles and access, on both sides. Ministry that grows without anyone losing control of their people's data.

And this: everyone should be able to receive the message. We're building live, on-your-phone sermon captions so a deaf or hard-of-hearing person can walk into any GLAD church, sit anywhere, and read every word as it's spoken. Because truly receiving a sermon is life-changing — and no one should be shut out of it.

The bottom line

I'm not a faceless company. I'm one founder who knows exactly what it feels like when the church isn't there — and I've spent every hour since building the software that makes sure it is.