Pricing, Roles & SetupA Quick Reference
Answers to the questions we hear most—covering pricing, user roles, account setup, and how the Planning Center integration works.
Who counts as a paid user?
Your paid seats are your Administrators and Team Members—anyone who logs into CareNote. Volunteers are free: each paid user includes 3 free email-only volunteers, and any additional volunteers beyond that allowance are just $1/user/month.
CareNote is $10/user/month when billed annually, or $15/user/month when billed monthly.
Roles—and which require a paid license
There are two login roles—Administrator and Team Member. On top of those, the “Account Owner” designation grants an Administrator access to CareNote Settings, and Volunteers take part by email without logging in.
Administrator
PaidA full-access login role: manage users and groups, create and assign care requests, view all care requests, and run reports. The site owner is an Administrator who also holds the Account Owner designation (see below).
Team Member
PaidCreate care requests, work the requests assigned to them, log interactions and notes, and run reports. Standard day-to-day care work.
Account Owner
DesignationNot a separate login role—it's a designation on an Administrator (typically the site owner) that unlocks CareNote Settings: billing, integrations (Planning Center, etc.), team-wide configuration, and import/export. More than one Administrator can hold it.
Volunteer
Free (3 per paid user; $1/mo each after)Not a login role—volunteers take part in care without logging in. They receive assignments and updates by email (and SMS on CareNote Plus) and can respond directly.
Why you may not see CareNote Settings as an Administrator
This is expected, and good to clear up. Access to CareNote Settings is tied to “Account Owner,” which is separate from the Administrator role. An Administrator can manage users, groups, and care work, but the Settings panel (billing, integrations, team-wide configuration) is reserved for Account Owners.
You can have more than one Account Owner, so this is easy to fix—we can grant Account Owner access to anyone who needs to see CareNote Settings. Just reach out and let us know.
CareNote Core vs. CareNote Plus
CareNote Core
Everything a team needs to run pastoral care: people and profiles, care requests with assignment and status workflow, interactions and notes, prayer requests, tasks, care groups, volunteers with email notifications, dashboards, user and team management, and Planning Center import.
CareNote Plus
Adds coordination-at-scale and automation features on top of Core:
- Deeper Planning Center integration—PCO Forms → care requests, two-way notes sync, tabs and lists sync.
- SMS & reply-to-accept—Volunteers and team members can accept care requests by text or email reply; first-to-accept group assignment.
- Automated workflows—Templates, triggers, conditional routing, and scheduled actions.
- AI congregant briefings—Context summaries before a visit.
- Documents & benevolence tracking—Files on profiles and groups, expense and budget tracking.
- Multi-campus—Campus-based filtering, permissions, and views.
- Advanced reporting—At-risk views, audit trail, and sentiment reporting.
- Web Push—iOS/Android push notifications.
Plus is a flat annual add-on for the whole team—it scales by team size rather than per-seat, so it’s predictable to budget. We’re happy to send exact Plus pricing for your team size.
How the Planning Center integration works
Here’s how sync behaves in each direction.
Planning Center → CareNote: automatic and real-time
Once connected, when someone’s information is created or updated in Planning Center, CareNote receives that change automatically via webhooks. After the initial connection and import, no manual action is required to keep people up to date.
CareNote → Planning Center: profile edits do not push back
By design, Planning Center stays your system of record for people, so changes you make to a profile in CareNote are not written back to PCO. What can flow back (on CareNote Plus, once enabled) is care interactions—visits, calls, emails, and notes can be exported into Planning Center as notes, so your PCO record reflects the care that’s happening.
Is any manual action required?
For ongoing people sync, no—webhooks handle it automatically. The one-time setup is connecting Planning Center and running the initial import. Pushing interactions back to PCO is an opt-in setting you enable once.
Trials & billing
Is your trial CareNote Core or CareNote Plus?
Every trial runs on CareNote Core. We don’t run trials on CareNote Plus, so every trial account starts on Core with the full set of pastoral-care features.
If you’d like to evaluate the Plus features specifically, you have two options: explore them on the CareNote Plus page, or—if your team is seriously considering Plus— reach out and we can arrange a limited-access trial of the Plus features so you can try them with your own data.
Trial length, dates, and billing
CareNote trials run for 14 days, not a full month. Your trial begins the day your account is created and ends 14 days later. If you need more time, the trial can be extended to a full 30 days—just ask.
No billing information is required during the trial. CareNote will automatically request billing information when your trial comes to an end, and you’ll be asked to subscribe or delete your account at that time.
Still have questions about pricing or setup? Contact us and we’ll help you get started.
Ready to transform your pastoral care?
Start your 14-day free trial or schedule a demo to see CareNote in action.