Provider and scope
Dovestead provides website creation, hosting, and management tools for churches and organizations. The provider is Yannick Meyer, a German sole proprietor trading under the name Dovestead; the public postal address appears in the Legal Notice. A person accepting these terms must be authorized to act for the organization.
Accounts and organization content
You must provide accurate account information, protect your sign-in credentials, and tell us promptly about suspected unauthorized access. You are responsible for the accuracy and lawfulness of content you submit, for having the rights needed to use it, and for deciding who in your organization may access the dashboard.
You retain rights in the church content you provide. You grant Dovestead permission to store, reproduce, adapt for display, and deliver that content only as reasonably necessary to provide, secure, and support the service. You are responsible for the privacy notices and decisions for your church's website visitors and submissions.
Plans, trial, and prices
The currently available plans are Foundation at $19 per month or $187 per year, and Gather at $39 per month or $384 per year. Prices are in U.S. dollars. An annual plan is charged at the stated annual amount for the selected annual period; a displayed monthly equivalent is informational. Other plan names shown as coming soon are not available for purchase.
The Dovestead trial lasts 14 days and starts on the first authenticated dashboard entry after the trial claim is verified. Merely viewing a private demo or requesting a trial does not start the clock. The trial does not automatically convert into a paid subscription and its expiry alone does not trigger a charge. To start paid service, an authorized representative must select a plan and complete the separate Stripe Checkout.
Checkout collects the billing address and business name and allows a tax identification number to be supplied. Any applicable tax and the total amount due will be displayed before payment is submitted.
Paid subscriptions and renewal
A paid subscription renews automatically at the monthly or annual interval selected in Checkout until canceled. Before submitting payment, the customer is shown the selected plan, recurring amount, and billing interval and must authorize the payment. The current billing date and subscription status are available in Plan & Billing. Stripe processes the recurring payment using the payment method associated with the subscription.
Church giving and Stripe fees
Church online giving through Stripe Connect is separate from the Dovestead subscription. For each successfully processed donation payment through Dovestead's Stripe integration, Dovestead charges a platform application fee equal to 1% of the total amount processed, including any optional estimated-fee-support amount selected by the donor. Stripe deducts this fee from funds collected for the church's connected Stripe account. Stripe's payment-processing fees are separate and are charged by Stripe to the church's connected account. The donor sees the donation amount and any optional estimated-fee-support amount before submitting payment.
Cancellation, payment failure, and recovery
A Primary Admin can schedule cancellation in Plan & Billing. Cancellation takes effect at the end of the then-current paid period, and paid service continues until that date. A pending cancellation can be reversed in the billing controls before the period ends.
When Dovestead records a subscription as past due, the product provides a seven-day recovery period. Billing recovery remains available during that period. If the payment is not recovered within seven days, the hosted website and normal service are suspended. A cancellation at the end of a paid term also suspends the hosted service when that term ends. Existing church content, account associations, and uploaded assets are retained for reactivation; this is not a promise that they will be retained indefinitely after permanent account closure.
Refunds and billing corrections
A cancellation does not by itself promise an automatic prorated refund for unused time in a paid billing period, whether monthly or annual. This does not waive any non-waivable statutory refund or withdrawal right, and it does not limit a customer's right to ask us to correct a mistaken or duplicate charge. Any goodwill refund or service credit that Dovestead chooses to provide for a service interruption or technical issue will not exceed the subscription fees paid for the affected monthly or annual billing period. A goodwill refund or service credit is a price adjustment, not an admission of liability, and does not waive or limit any right or remedy that cannot lawfully be waived or limited; it does not determine or cap damages. Any voluntary exception is considered individually and does not create a general entitlement to a refund.
Domains and third-party services
A domain may be registered, renewed, or managed through a third-party registrar or DNS provider. The customer is responsible for domain ownership and third-party fees unless an order says otherwise. Stripe, Brevo, Google YouTube API Services, and infrastructure providers may provide parts of the service under their own terms. Availability or policy changes by those providers may affect related features.
Suspension, termination, and data
We may restrict or suspend access when reasonably necessary to address non-payment, a security risk, unlawful use, or a legal requirement. For non-payment, the seven-day recovery rule above applies. Billing and recovery access remain available after service suspension. Church data and assets are not deleted solely because paid service has ended. For permanent account closure or a data export, contact hello@dovestead.com. We may retain records where required by law.
Availability and liability
The service may be changed or temporarily unavailable for maintenance, security, or reasons outside our control. No uptime service level is promised unless stated in a separate written agreement.
Nothing in these Terms excludes or limits liability to the extent such exclusion or limitation is prohibited by applicable law, including liability for intentional misconduct, gross negligence where it cannot lawfully be limited, death or personal injury caused by negligence, fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation, an express guarantee, or any other non-waivable statutory liability.
For ordinary negligence, Dovestead is liable only for breaches of material contractual obligations, meaning obligations essential to the proper performance of the agreement and on which the Customer may reasonably rely. In such cases, liability is limited to reasonably foreseeable damage typical for this type of agreement. The exceptions to these limitations stated above remain unaffected.
Any exclusion of indirect, incidental, special, exemplary, or consequential loss, or of loss of profits, revenue, goodwill, or data, applies only to the extent permitted by applicable law and does not remove liability for foreseeable, contract-typical loss where such liability cannot lawfully be excluded.
Data protection
Dovestead's platform processing is described in the Privacy Policy. Where Dovestead processes church visitor data on a church's documented instructions, the parties must complete and accept the applicable Data Processing Agreement. The parties' roles depend on the specific processing; these terms do not assign a blanket role for all data.
YouTube API Services
If you connect a YouTube account, your use of the YouTube API Services is also subject to the YouTube Terms of Service (https://www.youtube.com/t/terms) and the YouTube API Services Terms of Service (https://developers.google.com/youtube/terms/api-services-terms-of-service). You may revoke Dovestead's access in your Google security settings. Disconnecting inside Dovestead removes the local connection and cached YouTube status immediately and attempts Google's token revocation; if the provider is temporarily unavailable, an encrypted credential is held only in a retry queue until revocation succeeds or Google confirms it is invalid. External revocation is checked periodically while the authorization worker is configured and running; a detected revocation removes the local connection and cache. Temporary provider or worker outages may delay detection, so service monitoring and retry operation must remain enabled.
Governing law and disputes
The intended basis for business-to-business agreements is German law, to the extent permitted by applicable law. Mandatory rules that apply to a customer or transaction are not excluded. These terms do not impose an exclusive court venue; jurisdiction is determined under the applicable rules unless a valid separate agreement provides otherwise.
Changes and contact
Material changes will be communicated as required by law and the contract. Questions about these terms or billing: hello@dovestead.com.
Data Processing Agreement (DPA)
The following DPA provisions are included here for convenient access. They do not become effective through acceptance of the Terms of Service alone. The customer-specific processing schedule must be completed and the DPA must be separately accepted as described in the final section below.
Scope and roles
For the processing covered by this Agreement, the customer is the controller and Dovestead acts as processor only to the extent Dovestead processes personal data on the customer's documented instructions to provide the contracted website and dashboard services. Dovestead may act as an independent controller for its own account administration, billing, security, support, and legal compliance. The parties' roles must be determined by the actual purpose and means of each activity; this Agreement does not assign a blanket role to either party.
The customer must ensure that its instructions, collection practices, notices, and legal basis are lawful, including any condition required for special-category data. Dovestead will notify the customer if, in its reasonable opinion, an instruction infringes applicable data-protection law.
Subject matter, duration, and processing
The subject matter is hosting and administering the customer's church website and dashboard and processing visitor submissions the customer chooses to collect. The nature of processing includes collection, recording, organization, storage, retrieval, use to display data to authorized customer users, and return or deletion as specified in the applicable customer schedule. The duration is the service term and any return or deletion period expressly agreed in that schedule.
The customer schedule must identify the customer, service, processing purposes, duration, categories of data subjects and personal data, and any special-category data and safeguards. Processing operations may include web hosting, media storage, dashboard access, and handling contact, prayer, pastoral-care, and ministry sign-up submissions enabled by the customer.
Data subjects and data types
Data subjects may include church website visitors, people who contact or sign up with a church, and customer personnel whose information appears in the service. Data may include names, email addresses, phone numbers, postal addresses, form choices, free-text messages, account and membership details, and personal data contained in customer-provided content or uploads. Prayer or pastoral-care text may reveal religious beliefs. The customer must specify whether such information is in scope and document any required special-category condition and safeguards in its schedule.
Documented instructions and confidentiality
Dovestead will process in-scope personal data only on the customer's documented instructions, including instructions concerning transfers, unless applicable law requires otherwise. Dovestead will ensure that persons authorized to process the data are bound by confidentiality obligations. The customer may issue further instructions consistent with the service; additional work may be subject to agreement.
Security measures
Taking account of the nature of processing and information available to Dovestead, the service uses password hashing, session cookies marked HttpOnly and SameSite, CSRF checks for protected state-changing requests, rate limits on selected authentication and public actions, and tenant-scoped access checks. YouTube OAuth credentials are encrypted before storage. Backup tooling supports encryption using age, but backup schedules, retention, and encryption of every production backup must be confirmed for the relevant environment. These measures may change as the service evolves. No security certification, independent audit, or encryption-at-rest claim for the database or all uploaded assets is made.
Dovestead will notify the customer without undue delay after becoming aware of a personal-data breach affecting data processed under this Agreement and will provide information reasonably available to assist the customer in meeting its legal obligations. Dovestead will provide reasonable assistance with data-subject requests, security assessments, and regulator consultations, taking into account the nature of processing and information available to Dovestead.
Subprocessors
The service uses OVHcloud for Customer application hosting, Stripe for Dovestead subscription billing and Stripe Connect giving, Brevo for transactional email, and Google YouTube API Services when the customer activates the YouTube connection. A provider is a subprocessor under this Agreement only to the extent it processes in-scope personal data on Dovestead's behalf; provider roles may differ for payment, account, and optional integrations. The applicable customer schedule must identify the relevant subprocessor's legal entity, service, processing location, and transfer terms before the DPA takes effect for that processing.
The customer gives general authorization to use the subprocessors identified in its completed schedule. Dovestead will give notice of a proposed material change to those subprocessors. The customer may object on reasonable data-protection grounds within the notice period; the parties will work in good faith on a resolution, and if none is possible, the customer may discontinue the affected service in accordance with the service agreement.
International transfers
The Customer application, database, and uploaded assets are hosted in Canada. Other providers may process data in additional locations depending on the service and account configuration. Before the DPA applies to a transfer restricted by applicable data-protection law, the customer schedule must identify the relevant recipient and location and the transfer mechanism and supplementary safeguards relied on. Nothing in this Agreement itself represents that a particular transfer mechanism applies to every provider or processing activity.
Return, deletion, and audit
Upon termination of the relevant processing services, Dovestead will, at the Customer's choice, return or delete the personal data processed on the Customer's behalf and delete existing copies, unless applicable law requires continued storage. The agreed procedure, secure delivery method, deletion schedule, and applicable backup-retention arrangements are specified in the Customer Processing Schedule.
The product's 90-day rule for explicitly archived Inbox items and Sermons is separate from account closure and does not define deletion of all customer data. Dovestead will make available information reasonably necessary to demonstrate compliance with this Agreement and allow for audits or inspections by the customer or an independent auditor mandated by the customer, subject to reasonable notice, confidentiality, security, and protection of other customers' information. The practical scope and frequency are specified in the Customer Processing Schedule.
Parties and electronic acceptance
Dovestead is operated by Yannick Meyer, a German sole proprietor trading as Dovestead, at Sudetenstr. 7, 95482 Gefrees, Germany. Contact: hello@dovestead.com. The customer must identify its legal name and authorized representative in the customer schedule.
This Agreement becomes effective for a customer only when Dovestead provides that customer with the completed Agreement and processing schedule, and both parties affirmatively accept the same version. A documented electronic method may be used: Dovestead sends the versioned DPA and schedule to the verified Primary Admin email address; the authorized representative replies from that address expressly accepting the identified DPA version and its SHA-256 document hash; Dovestead records the email, sender, version, hash, timestamp, organization, and representative with the executed copy. The ordinary Terms checkbox does not by itself accept this DPA.