Effective August 19, 2026 · Updated November 4, 2026 · Steeple Cast is a Peace Builders project, published by McNeil Enterprises, Inc.

The short version

Steeple Cast exists to stream your church's services. It has no ads, no analytics and no tracking, and we never sell data. The app keeps its settings on your own devices and sends us only crash reports; the optional dashboard stores the minimum needed to run your stream. Churches on a paid plan stream through our relay, which keeps the service's sound and a few pictures only long enough to make its podcast episode and thumbnail.

The Steeple Cast app (iPhone / iPad)

Everything the app needs — board profiles, mixer settings, media, banners, and your YouTube stream key — is stored on the device itself. Stream keys are kept in the device Keychain. Camera video and board audio travel over your local Wi-Fi between your own devices. The finished stream goes from your iPad to YouTube: directly, or, for churches on a paid plan, through our relay (below). Otherwise we do not receive your video, your audio, or your congregation's data.

Microphone, camera, local-network, and speech-recognition permissions are used only for the streaming features they name. Live captions, when enabled, are transcribed on-device by Apple's speech recognizer.

Crash reports

If the app crashes, or stops unexpectedly while it is on screen, it sends us a crash report the next time it opens, through Google's Firebase Crashlytics. A report holds what we need to find the fault: where in the code it happened, the device model, the iOS and app versions, memory and temperature readings, a random ID for the installation (so we can count how many devices a problem affects), and a short log of what the app was doing, such as "stream connected" or "camera disconnected".

A crash report never contains your video, your audio, your stream key, the names of your devices or broadcasts, or web addresses. It isn't linked to you and isn't used to track you. Google keeps crash reports for 90 days.

The relay, podcasts and thumbnails (paid plans)

For a church whose plan includes it, the stream passes through our relay server, in Google Cloud in the United States, on its way to YouTube. The relay does not keep the video. It keeps the service's sound, and one picture every 30 seconds, in Google Cloud Storage:

• After the service, the sound becomes the church's podcast episode and the raw sound is deleted. The episode is normally just the sermon: our server tells the talking from the music in the sound itself, and nothing is sent anywhere else to do it. An episode the church publishes is a public file in its podcast feed; one it hasn't published stays private, with the whole service's sound kept beside it so the church can choose a different part, until it publishes or discards it.
• A service outside the church's podcast schedule gets no episode unless the church asks for one; its raw sound is kept for that until it's deleted after 7 days.
• The pictures are offered on the dashboard as thumbnails. Once one is chosen, all but the six offered are deleted. If the church's account has it set up, small copies of the six (320×180) are sent to Anthropic's Claude to suggest the best one; Anthropic doesn't use them to train its models.
• Anything of the raw sound or pictures still there after 7 days is deleted automatically.

Discarding an episode on the dashboard deletes its sound. The podcast feed lists the church's name, the podcast details it enters, and its published episodes.

The Steeple Cast dashboard (optional web account)

If your church creates a dashboard account, we store: your sign-in email and name (via Google sign-in), your church's name and timezone, your stream settings (including the YouTube stream key), the list of devices you pair, and a log of broadcasts started through the service. If you connect a YouTube account, we store the Google-issued token that lets the service create and title broadcasts on your channel; we never see your Google password. You can disconnect YouTube or revoke devices at any time in the dashboard, and disconnecting deletes the stored token.

Google user data received through YouTube APIs is used only to create, title, and manage your channel's live broadcasts at your direction. Our use and transfer of information received from Google APIs adheres to the Google API Services User Data Policy, including the Limited Use requirements. Steeple Cast also uses YouTube API Services; by using it you agree to the YouTube Terms of Service and the Google Privacy Policy.

Payments

Paid plans are bought and managed through Stripe, which handles the card details; we never see or store them. We keep the church's Stripe customer number and its plan's status and renewal date, so we know which features are on.

Deleting your data

Deleting the app removes everything it stored on the device. To delete a dashboard account and everything in it, use the dashboard or email us — we'll confirm within a few days.

Contact

Peace Builders, published by McNeil Enterprises, Inc. · ethan@peacebuilders.net