What the School Pays
The pricing model, running: what is switched on and what each module costs per day, the meter for the metered dimensions, a daily statement with today still accruing, the wallet and its runway, the top-up — and then the two screens nobody demos, what a school sees the morning the credit runs out, and the trail that explains every change to the bill.
Priced per day, prepaid, and visible while it happens
There is no plan fee here, no per-seat licence and no annual contract. Every module a school has switched on is priced each morning against the things it actually charges for — pupils on the roll, staff accounts, boarders, catalogued copies — and that day’s total is debited from a prepaid balance. A school that shrinks in January pays less in January, with nothing to renegotiate; a school that switches a module off stops paying for it the next morning. That is an unusual enough model to deserve scepticism, so this walkthrough is the meter rather than the promise: the tariff, the counts, the statement, the wallet, and — the part a demo normally skips — exactly what happens on the morning the balance reaches zero.
On this page
A balance, and how long it lasts
Everything starts at the wallet, because in this model the wallet is the subscription. There is no renewal date to diarise and no invoice to wait for — there is a balance, a burn rate, and the number that matters more than either: how many days of runway the two of them imply.
The balance, the burn, and the runway
What is in the wallet, what the school is spending a day at its current size, and therefore how long it has. Runway is the figure a bursar plans around, and it is computed rather than promised: balance divided by the burn the last fortnight actually produced.
Topping it up
Credit is bought in whatever amount suits the school — a term, a half-year, a year — and the estimate beside each option is computed from the school’s own burn rather than from a price list. Money in is the only transaction in this model; everything else is a debit the platform raises itself.
Ready to run your school on this?
Every screen in “A balance, and how long it lasts” is the live product, not a mockup. Create your school account, or have us walk you through it on a call.
What is switched on, and what each one costs a day
A subscription here is a set of modules and nothing else. There is no tier to be on and no bundle to outgrow: each module is either on, and priced daily against its own dimension, or off, and costing nothing.
One switch per module, with the price on it
Every module in the catalogue, with the ones this school runs switched on and their real daily cost beside them — the count, the rate, and the product of the two. The base platform is always on and cannot be switched off; everything else is the school’s decision, taken on this screen and effective the next morning.
And the meter for the things that are not per-day
Some costs are not a function of size. Email, SMS, document renders and payment events are consumed rather than held, so they are metered per event against a monthly allowance. The bar that matters is the allowance bar — it says how much of the month’s included quantity has gone.
See this on your own school’s data.
Every screen in “What is switched on, and what each one costs a day” is the live product, not a mockup. Create your school account, or have us walk you through it on a call.
One row per day, and today still running
The daily charge IS the billing artefact here — there is no invoice, because there is no billing period to invoice for. The statement is therefore a list of days, and the most interesting row on it is the one that has not finished yet.
The statement
A fortnight of service days, each with what it cost and the modules it was made of. The window totals are computed across the whole window rather than across the page you are looking at — the same figures whichever page you are on, which is not true of most statements.
Why today’s figure is not the daily burn
The one thing about this model that reads as a bug until it is explained, so it is explained on the screen. Today is priced on the count taken at midnight; nine pupils were admitted this morning. They bill from tomorrow, not today — so the accrual is lower than the live burn, and it is right.
And what the school actually paid
The payment record, separate from the ledger on purpose: the ledger says what was spent, this says what arrived and how. Two top-ups this year, both with the provider’s own reference — which is the number a bank reconciliation actually matches on.
Set this up for your team.
Every screen in “One row per day, and today still running” is the live product, not a mockup. Create your school account, or have us walk you through it on a call.
Why the bill changed
Every question about a usage-priced bill is a “why is this different from last month” question, and a model that cannot answer it is worse than a flat fee however much cheaper it is. So every change to what the school pays is an event on its own trail.
Every change to what the school pays, as sentences
A module switched on and what it added; a population that grew and by how much; a charge posted; a charge skipped and why; credit topped up; a switch-off refused because a commitment window was still running. Half these rows have no human actor at all — they are the system explaining itself, which is the half that makes the model auditable rather than merely cheap.
Ready to run your school on this?
Every screen in “Why the bill changed” is the live product, not a mockup. Create your school account, or have us walk you through it on a call.
And the morning the credit runs out
This is the phase a demo normally leaves out, and the reason to include it is that the honest answer is a good one. A school that has run out of prepaid credit has not lost anything. It has a bill, and it is told so — plainly, on every page, with the way to fix it one press away.
What a suspended school actually sees
The pupil register, under a real suspension. The bar across the top says what has happened in plain words and offers the two things a person in that position needs: top up, or talk to somebody. This used to be silent — the sidebar simply emptied and pages started refusing, and an administrator had to guess that the wallet was the cause. A suspension is a bill, not a mystery.
And the module that stays open, so it can be fixed
The billing pages remain reachable throughout — which sounds obvious and is the thing most systems get wrong, by locking a school out of the one screen that would let it pay. Top up here and the account is restored the minute the payment settles, and the day spent suspended appears on the statement as skipped rather than owed.
See this on your own school’s data.
Every screen in “And the morning the credit runs out” is the live product, not a mockup. Create your school account, or have us walk you through it on a call.
Run your whole school on one connected platform
Start with the base package, switch on the modules you need, and give every parent, student and staff member a single place to log in.