I don't have a problem with Linktree. It's a well-built tool that solves the exact problem it was designed to solve — a single link with a stack of buttons underneath it. For a lot of churches, it's the first thing anyone suggests when the "we need one link for everything" conversation comes up, and for a season, it works fine.
The cost doesn't show up on day one. It shows up about six months in, when the free plan's limits start mattering, or someone wants to embed a schedule instead of just a button, or the branding starts looking like every other link-in-bio page on the internet because that's exactly what it is — a template every creator, brand, and small business is using the same way.
The Part Nobody Budgets For
A generic link tool wasn't built with a church's specific needs in mind, which means every ministry-specific thing — a prayer request form, a volunteer schedule, a speaker request — ends up as a separate embedded link to yet another separate tool. You haven't actually solved the scattered-links problem. You've just moved all the scattered links onto one page that lists them instead of consolidating them.
There's also the branding question, which sounds minor until you notice it. A link-in-bio page under someone else's domain, with someone else's logo watermarked at the bottom, doesn't feel like it belongs to your church. It feels like a workaround, because that's what it is.
Where This Actually Lands
I'm not going to pretend a purpose-built tool is free where a generic one isn't — that's a real cost comparison a church should actually make. What I'd push back on is treating "free and generic" as automatically cheaper than "paid and built for what you're actually doing." The real cost of the generic option isn't the price. It's the six months of workarounds, the separate tools for prayer requests and scheduling that a link-in-bio page was never going to handle, and the slow realization that the free tool became more expensive in time than the paid one would have been in dollars.