Hallow Prayer and meditation

Hallow is a mobile application providing audio-guided prayer and meditation content grounded in Christian, and particularly Catholic, contemplative traditions. Its catalog includes daily prayers, gospel reflections, guided meditations based on practices such as Lectio Divina and the Ignatian Examen, and scripture-based sleep content. The app launched in December 2018 on the Apple App Store and Google Play following roughly eight months of development, and by mid-2020 it offered more than 500 contemplative sessions and had been used to pray over one million times across more than 50 countries.

The product combines individual practice with community features: users can create in-app prayer groups to share intentions, prayers and reflections, and can join seasonal community challenges such as the Pray40 Lenten challenge and the Pray25 Advent challenge. Content has been extended to high-production, celebrity-narrated series, with Jonathan Roumie and Mark Wahlberg featured on the platform. Reported product work includes personalization for prayer recommendations, audio-layering that lets users customize background chants and ambient sounds, and language support extending to Spanish, Portuguese and Polish.

Hallow is used by individual subscribers as well as Catholic schools, parishes, employers, families, priests and bishops, and the company's site also offers a student login path. Reported figures describe the app as the #1 Catholic app in the US App Store with a 4.9-star average rating, and it is characterized as the first religious app to reach Apple's overall top 10 during Lent in 2024.

Founding story

Alex Jones, a Chicago native and Notre Dame engineering graduate, had identified as an atheist before reconnecting with his Catholic upbringing while working as a consultant at McKinsey. He encountered the contemplative practice of Lectio Divina and found that existing secular meditation apps did not serve his spiritual needs from a Christian context. After researching Christian prayer and meditation traditions and consulting priests and practitioners, he co-founded Hallow with Alessandro DiSanto and Erich Kerekes, friends from the University of Notre Dame with engineering and finance backgrounds. The team bootstrapped an MVP, with Jones teaching himself to code, and launched about eight months after conceiving the idea. The name derives from the phrase "Hallowed be thy name."

Business model

Hallow operates a consumer subscription business built on a freemium model, with free content alongside a paid Hallow Plus tier that unlocks the full library of guided prayer and meditation sessions. Distribution is through the Apple App Store and Google Play. The company has also used free-subscription programs, such as one-year Hallow Plus grants for recently unemployed workers announced in June 2020, and works with parishes, dioceses, Catholic schools and employers as institutional channels.

Recurring subscription revenue from the freemium Hallow Plus tier sold direct to consumers, supplemented by institutional relationships with parishes, schools and employers. One third-party estimate places monthly revenue at approximately $278,000, or roughly $3.3 million in annual recurring revenue, and describes the business as profitable.

Traction

Reported metrics include over one million prayers across more than 50 countries by June 2020; more than 25 million downloads and 500 million prayers across 150 countries by early 2026; roughly 300% year-over-year active user growth by end-2023; near-60% 30-day retention; average session length of about 12 minutes; a 4.9-star App Store rating; and a reported 220% increase over baseline in daily active users during the December 2024 Advent challenge. Third-party estimates cite about $278,000 in monthly revenue, roughly 188,000 monthly website visits and approximately 225 employees.

Latest developments

In February 2025, founder Alex Jones stated publicly that EU over-regulation was making it effectively impossible for Hallow to operate in the European Union, following the app's earlier removal from the Chinese app market; coverage linked the situation to the EU Digital Services Act's reporting requirements, which are said to be stricter for the app because of the sensitive nature of religious data. Jones noted that a shutdown would block planned Polish, French, German and Italian language expansions, and ADF International publicly offered to review the details.