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2025-12-31-accounts

STEPBible Charity number 1193950

STEP Bible Annual Reports presented at the AGM on 28[th] August 2026

Data development David Instone-Brewer

This has been the year of AI.

We've explored many uses, and abandoned some. We experimented with a chatbox that linked to STEPBible, but settled instead on something better, which Eric is building with Nathan (he’ll say more)

AI creates ideal prose that is concise, readable, unambiguous, and reliably translatable. We've been careful to constrain its creativity by always giving it the verified data to summarise and restricting its use of snippets or web searches. This method has been used to create:

Summaries re people in Genealogies

To use this, click on anyone’s name, then click on the ‘Family’ button. Jamie came up with this amazing interface – with the help of AI of course.

Summaries of events in Chronologies

When I read through these, it was a wonderful refresher on the whole of Bible history. I rarely had to edit it, except to add details about which we hadn’t given it any information.

Etymology of Names

We have removed the simplistic name ‘meanings’ which were too often wrong or guesswork. The new version, which is still being checked, discusses multiple possibilities, often based on other languages, such as Egyptian or Persian origins.

Related words

These have been based on BDB's theory that relates all Hebrew words to 3-letter roots. The new list takes into account non-Hebrew origins and other developments in lexography.

This needs checking – any volunteers?

Matthew Henry Modernised (MHM)

Matthew Henry dealt with the text straightforwardly and strived to apply even obscure verses to the Christian life. However, the original English is complex and often archaic.

We gave an AI the old MHC (complete commentary) and asked for a rewrite in English that someone could understand as a second language. The result is remarkable - I've seen things in there, and in the Bible text, I've never noticed before. For example, in Lev.6.4 it highlighted repenting to your victim before asking God for forgiveness – a teaching that I thought later Jews had invented.

LXX data

This has been ‘almost done' for too long. An AI has now proposed the final missing morphologies. We’ve found that none of the AIs know the LXX text accurately, but they are very good at ancient Greek grammar - if you supply the exact text.

Chris S is now checking the AI suggestions.

Tagging NIV

Sami is using AI for tagging, which is much better than our previous method using the Berkeley aligner (a very early AI). It still needs human checking, but much less. And it even tags preposition prefixes and pronoun suffixes – eg it supplies 3 tags for “IN HIS name” which is merged as one word

STEPBible Charity number 1193950

in Hebrew. James Strong didn't even supply numbers for these word-segments because this level of detail was too difficult to record on paper.

Sami has also upgraded his drag'n'drop tagging editor to make the final human editing easy.

Anyone want to have a go?

Text commentary

Someone asked (I think at last year's AGM) how to use all the morphology information. We will soon have a text-commentary that highlights all these nuances hiding in the Hebrew and Greek text, without discussing theology.

We deliberately used AI in order to enhance objectivity, and we prevented it consulting the web. We asked it to avoid jargon where possible. Of course it still has to mention that a verb is jussive, but it explains what that means in the context of that individual verse.

Bob G shows how to explain morphology in a straightforward way in his 1Thes commentary (linked in the Summary box). He also figured out how to teach AI's to analyse the text and make them stick to just the verified data we supply.

This is a VERY long job. The NT is finished and is now being fact-checked by a separate AI which is making lots of suggestions and catching a few errors – which humans will adjudicate. And the OT is almost done.

Most of the day-to-day work is done without AIs, especially:

OT Lexicon update

Andrew O is doing a massive job of revising the OT lexicon and adding example references. Along the way, he's checking and correcting many inaccuracies. All this is done without the aid of AI – quite remarkable. I hope to implement it soon.

NT variants are already well noted in the modules VarApp and SBLGNT – which are both upgraded in STEPBible. Important OT variants are in the THOT module.

Now we are aiming to include all plausible variants that could alter the meaning. These will be added to Greek and Hebrew modules and then to all tagged texts. Most of the data is now assembled, though there is still a lot of work to do.

All the data produced by STEPBible volunteers is releases on a very open license on Github. We know of 40 other projects that have been built using it, though there’s probably many more. If your mind dwells in Bible details, offer some time, and your work will be immortalised.

We've found that many (perhaps most) seminaries now recommend STEPBible. I was asked to give an hour-long intro at Westminster College in Cambridge, and made it into a video. So if you want to know how to apply the new features in Bible studies, click on More>Videos to watch it, and other videos.

STEPBible Charity number 1193950

Tagging

Patrick Tang

The NIV New Testament tagging has been implemented. So far no issues reported.

Tagging is being done using a new GUI, i.e. Sami’s tagging utility / drag-and-drop editor, which accelerates tagging and makes final human edits easier.

Old Testament tagging is being done using AI-assisted preliminary tagging (Sami) followed by human review. An initial estimate is that this will be finished in about 24 months – the baseline rate of work to tag approx. 930 OT chapters will be 1 chapter/day.

Patrick asked for volunteers to read and review chapters.

Landing Pages

Luke Letellier

In 2025 it was recognized that STEPBible needed a ‘landing page’ - a standalone web page created specifically for explaining:

Since virtually all online applications have a landing page, this was seen as a logical and necessary step forward.

Luke is in the process of creating a proof of concept for the landing page as a means of iterating through different options that are available & determining which path is best taken. Once the STEPBible team is in agreement with the general content and flow of the prototype, a professional developer who has volunteered their services will be invited to convert it into a fully functional website, refining it as needed.

User Engagement Mark Cannon

UE is essentially the bridge between the developers and the users, offering technical support, managing contacts via feedback@stepbible.org, and managing FAQ resources which include 14 video guides on the YouTube channel including demo videos on new features. Site guide content includes clickable infographics and walkthroughs.

Feedback submissions have increased by around 33% over three years, from 310 → 412 across AGM cycles. The backlog of open queries has been reduced from 198 last year to 72 currently, achieved by improved housekeeping and resolution. These are generally answered by developers

Feedback can get swamped by bots and web spider traffic so Patrick set up a dedicated server to divert them to and thus improve analytics.

Social media development has progressed with a new admin Matt Ferris who is posting new features monthly.

David added that Mark sends very detailed responses to queries and takes time with people.

STEPBible Charity number 1193950

Modules

Darcy McKinnon

Currently we have:

David added that Jamie does the difficult work with modules and Darcy keeps on top of developments and integrates them into the system.

User Experience Daicy Hexiao

Recent and near-complete UI improvements:

• Welcome/FAQ panel redesigned from ambiguous buttons into an accordion-style FAQ for clearer discoverability.

• Copy/share UI revamped: Legacy copy dialog was large and jarring; new smaller, draggable copy modal enables easy selection of verse ranges and natural copy workflows, including highlighting-tocopy.

• Genealogy tool has two access paths: click a person in passage → "Family" button, OR via Resources → People in the Bible → select a family. This provides an interactive family tree with dynamic panels (passages, tree, person details); draggable sizing; shareable deep links to open directly to a person/tree. Jamie has done a lot of work on the genealogies.

• Interlinear control has been clarified so that users can see more easily how to click between versions to change which language controls the word order in interlinear displays.

Programming

Nathan Vercaemert

The programming report for 2026 showcases the work of Doug, CJ, and Jamie, as well as Eric's upcoming work. Nathan’s work was primarily spent coordinating and collaborating as well as doing bug fixes, UI improvements, and decluttering.

Jamie : Both the genealogy and chronology apps were released during the 2026 AGM cycle. These are polished sub-applications within the STEPBible ecosystem.

CJ : We were able to deploy CJ’s work, which allows Dyslexic users to read with the OpenDyslexic font.

Also, very exciting: CJ implemented a “Related Verses” feature that introduced LLM-based embeddings into our codebase. This can be used by opening AI.StepBible.org and appears in the usual search box, in the button “Meaning”.

STEPBible Charity number 1193950

Doug : A myriad of contributions were submitted by Doug and accepted into our codebase. Ranging from reset-link handling improvements and Dark mode improvements, to ironing out discrepancies in our Bible Project video listings. Doug’s contributions were numerous and helpful. He also made progress in inserting the full STEPBible code into Android.

Eric : As of the 2026 AGM, we’ve deployed a proof of concept for an overhaul of the basic search function; it will use a well-refined database of normalized commentaries to search the Bible using LLM embeddings. This runs on STEPBible servers with no external cloud API calls. This works even when searching for “beatitudes,” “talking donkey,” and modern concepts like “social media”.

Patrick : Alternate morphology is now linked from word analysis to the Perseus morphology engine where applicable.

Nathan : Besides coordinating and collaborating with the other developers (and other various small improvements/fixes/changes), Nathan spent the last four months of the 2026 AGM cycle working on:

A significant victory for the 2026 AGM cycle was an uptick in developer contributions. We’ve seen increased interest from new developers and are looking forward to continuing the relationships.

STEP STEP - GA4

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Google analytics report re STEPBible.org

Event count

3.8M

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Active users
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239K

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Active users by Country   Active users by Region   Active users by Operating system  
COUNTRY ACTIVE USERS REGION ACTIVE USERS OPERATING SYSTEM ACTIVE USERS
China 106K Shanghai 12K Windows 128K
United States 58K Ohio 10K Macintosh 38K
Singapore 11K England 8.7K iOS 31K
United Kingdom 9.5K Zhejiang 7.4K Android 28K
Canada 6.6K Texas 6.6K Linux 10K
Hong Kong 4.4K Guangdong Province 6.6K Chrome OS 1.8K
Australia 3.3K California 5.6K Tizen 3
View countries  View cities  View operating systems 
Event count  Total users  Event count per active user  Ev  Active users by Language   Active users by   Event count by Event name  
3.8M 240K 16 0 Platform/Device cat…
PLATFORM/DEVICE… ACTIVE USERS EVENT NAME EVENT COUNT
English
100K web / desktop 179K page_view 1.7M
Chinese
web / mobile 55K session_start 664K
80K Spanish
web / tablet 3.1K scroll 514K
Portuguese
60K
German web / smart tv 4 view_search_results 427K
40K French user_engagement 264K
Korean
20K first_visit 223K
0 50K 100K click 4.7K
01 01 01 0
Jul Aug Sept
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STEP STEP - GA4

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Event count Active users
11m 1.5m
Active users by Country   Active users by Region   Active users by Operating system   Event count  Total users  Event count per active user 
11m 1.5m 7.2
COUNTRY ACTIVE USERS REGION ACTIVE USERS OPERATING SYSTEM ACTIVE USERS
China 1.4m Gansu 1m Windows 1.4m 1.5m
Singapore 599k Shanghai 39k Macintosh 37k
United States 77k Zhejiang 21k iOS 35k 1m
United Kingdom 11k Guangdong Province 15k Android 28k
Canada 7.6k Tibet 15k Chrome OS 2.6k
500k
Germany 5.2k Jiangsu 12k Linux 2.1k
Hong Kong 4.8k New York 9.9k UNIX 3
01 01 01 0
Oct Nov Dec
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Active users by Language   Active users by   Event count by Event name  
Platform/Device cat…
PLATFORM/DEVICE… ACTIVE USERS EVENT NAME EVENT COUNT
English
web / desktop 1.5m page_view 3.3m
Chinese
web / mobile 60k session_start 2m
Spanish
web / tablet 3.2k scroll 1.7m
French
web / smart tv 5 view_search_results 1.6m
Portuguese
German first_visit 1.5m
Korean
user_engagement 1m
0 200k 400k 600k 800k 1m 1.2m click 8.7k
View languages  View platform devices  View events 
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13/04/2026, 13:12

Analytics | Google analytics report re STEPBible.org

All accounts  STEP STEP - GA4  Try searching "Web overview"

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Analytics

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Google analytics report re STEPBible.org

Custom 1 Jan - 31 Mar 2026 

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Active users

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861k

7.4m

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by
Country
ctive users		 
Map data ©2026
COUNTRY ACTIVE USERS
China 575k
Singapore 162k
United States 74k
United Kingdom 11k
Canada 8.1k
Australia 3.7k
Philippines 3.5k

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Active users by Region   Active users by Operating system  
REGION ACTIVE USERS OPERATING SYSTEM ACTIVE USERS
Gansu 361k Windows 735k
Shanghai 16k Macintosh 42k
Zhejiang 11k iOS 39k
California 11k Android 32k
Guangdong Province 9.3k Linux 3.3k
England 9.2k Chrome OS 2.3k
Texas 9.1k Firefox OS 4
View cities  View operating systems 
Event count  Total users  Event count per active user  Ev 
7.4m 863k 8.6 0
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Try searching "MoM growth in users for each device type"

Custom 1 Mar - 30 Jun 2026 

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A All Users Add comparison 

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Active users

Event count

13m

1.9m

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Active users by Country   Active users by Region  
COUNTRY ACTIVE USERS REGION ACTIVE USERS
Singapore 953k California 50k
United States 207k England 32k
China 143k Tokyo 31k
Brazil 84k Special Region of Yogyakarta 30k
Indonesia 75k Hessen 28k
Hong Kong 72k State of Sao Paulo 27k
Vietnam 55k Punjab 25k
Map data ©2026
View countries  View cities 
Active users by Operating system   Event count  Total users  Event count per active user 
13m 1.9m 7.2
OPERATING SYSTEM ACTIVE USERS
Windows 1.7m 800k
Macintosh 98k
600k
iOS 49k
Android 44k
400k
Linux 4.9k
Chrome OS 2.6k 200k
Firefox OS 3
01 01 01 01 0
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Charity number 1193950

STEP Bible financial report 1[st] January 2025 to 31[st] December 2025

Opening balance (2025/01/01) £2,492.59 Donations to STEPBible Miscellaneous £2,275.51 Membership (2025) £948.65 Expenses* Cloudflare (2024) £228.41 PayPal fees £122.39 * 2025 Cloudflare expenses (£230.34, US$297) were paid 2026/01/03 Closing balance (2025/12/31) £5,365.95

Opening balance (2026/01/01) £5,365.95 Donations to STEPBible Miscellaneous £1,674.31 Membership (2026) £521.00

Charity number 1193950

Expenses* Cloudflare (2025) £230.34 Data proc./programming support £1,095.80 PayPal fees £111.09 Current balance £6,124.03

The projected expenses for the Cloudflare service in 2026 are US$300, or £225 at the current exchange rate. As well, data processing and programming support charges are projected to be £2,000 by year end. PayPal fees will be approximately £200.