Hosanna

• Tiago Inês
• 31 Jul, 2026
• • Talk

Why We Started Building Hosanna

Why We Started Building Hosanna The beginning of a project that started with a simple idea: worship software should be better. Hosanna didn't start as a company, a SaaS platform, or a big product roadmap. It started with a much simpler problem. There are plenty of tools for musicians. There are plenty of applications for displaying lyrics and chords. There are even some very capable applications for churches. But after using some of them, it became increasingly obvious that there was room for something different. We wanted something modern, open, flexible, and built around the way churches actually work. The original idea was heavily inspired by applications such as Songbook Pro and OpenSong. These tools demonstrated that having a digital songbook could be incredibly useful, but we wanted to take the concept further. The goal was not simply to make another application that displays chords. The goal was to build an ecosystem for worship teams. Starting with ChordPro One of the first decisions was to use ChordPro as a foundation. Instead of storing songs in a proprietary database format, songs could be represented as text. That made them portable, editable, versionable, and easy to work with. It also meant that the actual song remained understandable outside of the application. That principle became important very early: Your songs should belong to you. From there, the project began taking shape around a proper ChordPro formatting and rendering engine, including chord transposition and the ability to turn simple song files into something designed for musicians. At that point, Hosanna was still very much an experiment. There wasn't a polished dashboard. There wasn't a service planner. There wasn't an online platform. There certainly wasn't a website announcing a finished product. There was just a codebase and a growing list of things that would be useful. More than a songbook As development continued, the scope naturally expanded. A church doesn't only need a list of songs. It needs to organise those songs. It needs to prepare services. It needs musicians to be able to access the same material. It needs information to remain available even when the internet isn't perfect. And, most importantly, it needs the software to stay out of the way when worship actually starts. That changed the direction of the project. Hosanna stopped being just an experiment in building a better songbook and started becoming something much bigger. The architecture began separating the mobile application, dashboard and server. Shared functionality was extracted into reusable packages. Local storage and caching became important parts of the design. The project was becoming an ecosystem. Still only the beginning Looking back, the early versions of Hosanna were very different from what we're building now. That is probably the most interesting part. Many of the things that now feel obvious started as small experiments, half-finished ideas, or problems that needed solving. Hosanna is still evolving. But the original principle hasn't changed: Build tools that help the church, don't get in its way. This is the story of how we're trying to do that.