BUILT / for the house
Free mockup

About the studio

A studio of Toaster's Media,
built for the house.

Built for the House is a sub-brand of Toaster's Media — a media company that builds software, sites, and systems for things we believe in. We are its church studio. Custom design. Real photography. A Sunday Engine that does the boring work. A safe skin over Planning Center that never takes a cut.

Why we exist

Because the church deserves
better than a template.

We started by rebuilding CityLine, our home church, off a SnapPages template. It was supposed to take three weeks. It took three months, because once we started doing it right, we couldn't stop.

What we noticed: the same builders kept showing up across the churches we respected. The same fonts. The same hero blocks. The same modal that says "we'd love to meet you." And in the background, the same quiet 2.3% slipping out of every offering envelope. The church was paying handsomely — through its giving — to look like every other church.

So we built CityLine differently. Bespoke. Fast. Reverent. With an AI engine in the background doing the post-Sunday work no one had time for. When it shipped, three other pastors emailed. Built for the House is what we built so we could say yes.

How we work

Four principles, in order.

These aren't taglines. They're the questions we ask in every studio meeting before we ship a thing.

  1. [ 01 ]

    Reverence over novelty

    We design for the gathered church first, the smartphone scroll second. Quiet beauty. Generous white space. Type that reads like it was set, not generated.

  2. [ 02 ]

    Make the math honest

    We tell churches what they're really paying, not what's on the invoice. The number that matters is the one that comes out of the offering.

  3. [ 03 ]

    Theological care

    Every line of AI-assisted copy passes the Piper/Keller test before it ships. Christ as King and Son. Trinitarian. Reverent. Hope grounded in the gospel of grace — never therapy talk, never prosperity.

  4. [ 04 ]

    Safe by architecture

    We never hold what we don't need. Money on Planning Center. PII on Church Center. We're a beautiful presentation layer with the smallest possible blast radius.

Security & trust

A safe skin over
Planning Center.

The most secure church website is the one that never holds money or member data. We are built around that single conviction. If we can't be a safe skin, we redirect.

  • Money never touches us

    Give buttons link or iframe to {church}.churchcenter.com/giving. Payments run on PCO Giving → Stripe (PCI-DSS Level 1). Card data never enters our DOM, network, or logs. We can't leak what we don't see.

  • PII never touches us

    Connect, registration, and prayer forms post to Planning Center directly — through Church Center embeds or a write-through function that persists and logs nothing. Member data stays where you already trusted it.

  • Per-church OAuth, least scope

    We use per-tenant OAuth refresh tokens, encrypted with a distinct key per church. Scopes are limited to calendar and publishing — never giving, never people. One leaked ciphertext can't reach another church.

  • Kill-switch in your hands

    You can revoke our access from your Planning Center side in two clicks, any time, with no negotiation. We also keep a one-click revoke-all for emergencies.

  • Built to be audited

    Every page is static, every function is small, every dependency is pinned. We hand our security checklist to outside red-teamers and ask them to break it.

We publish our red-team checklist on request and welcome an outside audit before signing. Planning Center scope reference: api.planningcenteronline.com.