A few have hit on the monthly fees that may accrue. Here's a look at some of the options you have that are either free with the base package or additional:
HIFI Audio/Video: Additional $10/month
iPhone Church App: Custom iPhone App just for your Church. $199 to set up and $10/month additional.
Live Webcasting: Only $10 added to your base monthly fee. Only $2.00 per webcast hour (additional usage fee), OR... Only $5.00 per VIDEO webcast hour (additional usage fee).
Auto-Blog Import: Free
Auto-Upload MP3: $1 charge for every sermon uploaded
FTP Batch Upload: $1 charge for every sermon uploaded
SOLO Site Feature: Additional $10 per month
Email Upload: $1 per sermon uploaded
Online Donations: Free
For what it's worth, we pay for the HiFi option (Sermons sound much better this way). As already noted, your monthly fee includes 10 sermons uploaded in that month using either the website or their upload tool. If you upload a video they charge extra for that but the 10 free sermon upload thing is for any length MP3.
I've been recording and uploading sermons for Churches since 2000 before MP3 was the preferred method. Back then we uploaded Real Audio sermons that could be streamed over dialup. Yes, dialup.
When I started recording in MP3, I initially saved at 32 kbps as Fred Greco rightly noted that it was a sweet spot for quality vs size. That said, I host Church web sites for free and I can tell you that even a year's worth of sermons recorded at 32 kbps adds up. One of the things that started making me think that the idea of hosting sermons on my own site was a bad idea was that just to back up all the zipped up files (including audio) was over 4GB after two years. I still host this traditional method for a few friends but I don't recommend it any more.
We've been really happy with Sermon Audio. We signed up at the 2011 PCA GA. We had about 150 sermons in our library already so I used the FTP batch uploading feature. That cost $150 but it brought us up to date.
Now this may seem steep but it's really an advertising expense. I'm pretty impressed at the number of people that find us through Sermon Audio. It's an additional way to find our Church. In fact, I just got an email from a Father whose daughter and son-in-law were stationed at Quantico and he sent us a note asking us to reach out to them to invite them to our Church. He found us on Sermon Audio and thought we were solid.
One of the recent features I discovered is Twitter integration as well as a Blog Feed thing. You have the option to have your own Blog on SA (free) but we already post every sermon on our website (e.g.
Glimpses of Glory (Mark 9:2-29) | Hope of Christ Church). When I post a new sermon, Sermon Audio daily checks the RSS feed and will add a blog entry. It's just another way to be found. Here's what it looks like at SA:
Hope of Christ Church - SermonAudio.com (not a pretty URL but it's still free advertising). I also have it set up to send out a Tweet whenever there's a new sermon added or blog entry:
https://twitter.com/HopeOfChrist
Neither the Pastor nor I are really big Tweeters so this is a nice way to keep our feed active.
