PodSaid for Church Communication Directors — FAQ

This is a plain-English guide for the person who quietly keeps a church’s website, socials, and weekly email running. It answers the practical questions you’re likely to have before adding PodSaid — the “ask our sermons anything” widget — to your site. No jargon, no sales pitch. Just what it does, what it costs, and what happens if something goes wrong.

What does PodSaid actually put on our website?

Two lines of HTML. That’s it. One <script> tag that loads the widget, and one <ask-pod-widget> tag where you want the search/chat box to appear — usually the sermons page, sometimes the homepage. Visitors see a search box. They type a question like “what has our pastor said about grief?” and get a plain-language answer with links to the specific sermons it came from.

The whole bundle is 47 KB gzipped and loads with defer, which is a technical way of saying it waits until the rest of your page has finished loading before it does anything. Your page speed doesn’t take a hit.

How long does setup take, and do I need a developer?

If your website platform lets you paste HTML into a page (Squarespace, WordPress, Wix, Webflow, custom — nearly all of them do), you can do this yourself in about two minutes.

End to end — from signing up, to us collecting your sermon archive, to the widget being live on your site — it’s roughly 40 minutes. The bulk of that is us pulling in your sermons from YouTube or your RSS podcast feed and getting them ready. The part where you actually touch your website is the quick bit.

If you get stuck, email us. We’ll paste the snippet in with you on a screen-share.

Is our sermon audio/video going anywhere I can’t see?

No. We read your sermons from wherever they already live publicly — your YouTube channel or your podcast RSS feed. We don’t ask you to upload anything, and we don’t move your files. The audio and video stay where they’ve always been.

What we do is create a searchable transcript index so the AI can find the right moment in the right sermon. Your congregation still watches on YouTube (or listens on Apple Podcasts, or wherever) — we just help visitors find what they’re looking for faster.

If you take a sermon down from YouTube, it drops out of the index the next time we sync.

Will the AI say things our pastor didn’t say?

This is the question we get most, and it’s the right question to ask.

The AI is grounded in your sermons only. When a visitor asks something, we pull the most relevant snippets from your archive and hand them to the AI with an explicit instruction: “Answer only from the provided context. Do not use general knowledge.” If the archive doesn’t cover the question, it says so — something like “I couldn’t find that in the sermons here.” It doesn’t fill the silence with generic seminary answers or wander into someone else’s theology.

Every answer shows the sermons it drew from, with clickable links. If you ever wonder whether a claim is legitimate, one click takes you to the source.

We’re honest about the limit: no AI is perfect at paraphrasing. It can occasionally summarize a sermon slightly awkwardly. But it will not invent a sermon your pastor never gave, and it will not put words in their mouth from outside your archive.

What happens if PodSaid pushes a bad update on a Saturday night?

Fair concern, and it deserves a real answer.

We offer two ways to get widget updates, and you pick which one fits your comfort level.

Float is the default. The widget loads from widget.podsaid.com/v1/widgets.iife.js — a URL that always points at our latest tested release. When we ship a fix or an improvement, it flows to your site within about five minutes. Every release passes automated tests and a bundle-size check before it can ever reach Float. This is the “let PodSaid handle it” mode, and it’s what most churches want.

Lock is for churches who want zero surprises. Instead of the floating URL, you paste a pinned version like widget.podsaid.com/v1.2.3/widgets.iife.js. That file is cached for a full year and never changes. When you’re ready to take a new version, you swap the number in the URL yourself, on a Monday morning, on your schedule. Nothing on your site changes until you decide it does.

Both options are free and neither requires a developer — it’s the same paste, just a different URL.

Our honest framing: Float for churches who want us to handle everything. Lock for churches who want to control when updates land. You can switch between them any time.

How do you test releases before they hit our site?

Every change we ship goes through an automated test suite before it can be published. That includes rendering checks (does the widget still look right?), a bundle-size gate (has anyone accidentally made the widget bloated?), and integration checks against real sermon archives.

If a build fails any of those, it doesn’t get published. Nothing reaches Float or Lock until it’s passed the gate.

We also eat our own cooking — the widget is running on our own site, so any regression usually shows up for us before you’d ever see it.

Who can see what visitors ask? Are we storing personal info?

The only thing the widget sends from a visitor’s browser is the text of their question. No name, no email, no cookies planted by us, no tracking pixels, nothing that identifies who’s asking. We don’t know if it’s the same person asking twice.

You (as the church) can see aggregate question data in your dashboard — things like “what are people asking about this month?” — which is genuinely useful for planning sermon series. But there’s no personal information tied to any question because we never collected any.

Your API key is also origin-locked. That means it only works from your church’s domain. If someone views your page source, copies your key, and pastes it onto their own site, they get a 403 error. Your key can’t be stolen and reused elsewhere.

Can we see the questions that are being asked?

Yes — this is one of the most useful side-effects of running PodSaid.

Every question asked through your widget shows up in your console dashboard. You see the exact wording of the question, when it was asked, and which sermons the AI pointed to in reply. There’s no visitor identity attached (see the section above on personal info) — just the query and the citations.

For your pastor and your teaching team, that’s real signal. In your congregation’s own words, you see what people are trying to learn about your church. Many pastors use it as honest input for sermon planning — especially the questions where the archive came up thin, because those point to teaching people are actively looking for.

What if we cancel? Do we lose our archive? Does the widget disappear cleanly?

Removing the widget is deleting the two lines of HTML you added. That’s the whole process. There’s no hidden code, no lingering script, no orphaned files on your server.

We keep your account data for 30 days after cancellation in case you change your mind, then it’s deleted. Your sermons themselves were never ours — they’ve always been on YouTube or in your RSS feed, exactly where they were before you signed up.

No lock-in, no exit fee, no “please stay” phone call from a sales rep. It’s just software you either use or you don’t.

What does it cost?

Free. For churches getting started. Widget on your site, full sermon indexing, up to a reasonable monthly question volume. Real usable product, not a crippled trial.

Indie — $14.99/month and up. For churches that want their own branded page (like yourchurch.podsaid.com), higher question limits, and priority support. Priced to be an easy line item for a small church.

Enterprise — $499/month and up. For denominations, multi-site churches, or ministries that need custom integrations, a dedicated environment, or specific compliance and reporting. Talk to us — we’ll build a quote that fits.

We don’t do surprise price increases mid-contract, and there’s no setup fee on any tier.

Can PodSaid pull other content from our website — service times, ministry pages, staff bios?

Not yet, and this is worth being straight about.

It’s by far our most-requested feature. Church websites carry a lot more than sermons — service times, staff bios, ministry pages, event calendars, resources you’ve been building for years. Being able to answer “when does the youth group meet?” or “who leads worship?” from that same widget is where we’re heading.

We’re actively building it and expect to ship this year. If your church would like to be a pilot partner — shaping how it works, trying it on your site first — please reach out. That’s the fastest way to make sure it fits how your website is actually laid out.

Today the widget is scoped to your sermon archive only. If a visitor asks about something off-archive, the AI honestly says it can’t find that in what’s been preached — same behavior as any other question the sermons don’t cover.

What if a visitor asks something inappropriate or controversial?

Two things to know here, and we want to be straight with you rather than oversell.

First, the AI can only answer from your sermons. If someone types in something crude or off-topic, the AI has nowhere to pull an answer from, so it typically responds that it can’t find that in the archive. It doesn’t take the bait.

Second — and this is the honest part — we don’t currently have a doctrinal or theological filter. What that means in practice: if your pastor has preached on a hard topic (grief, doubt, forgiveness, sexuality, politics from the pulpit), the AI can and will surface those sermons when someone asks. That’s usually a feature, not a bug — it lets visitors hear what your pastor actually said in their own words. But if your pastor has never addressed a topic, the AI won’t invent a position and it won’t borrow one from another church. It will simply say it doesn’t have material on that.

If a specific type of question keeps coming up and you’d rather the widget didn’t engage with it, tell us. We can help.

Still have questions?

Email [email protected]. A real person — usually me — answers. We’re a small shop, and we like it that way.