Who is building Kastr, and why
The whole story, without a mission page. Kastr is pre-launch, has no customers, and is building one thing: family communication for school districts, at a published price that the contract stops us from raising.
| Not this | Decision | Why, and who to use instead |
|---|---|---|
| A tool for individual teachers | Permanent | Classroom-first platforms already own that audience and do it well. We sell to districts, and the buyer is a CTO or a communications director. |
| A fit for schools under about 500 students | Permanent | Wrong unit economics for both sides. A single small private school will get more from a free classroom tool than from a district contract. |
| A student information system | Permanent | We integrate with yours. PowerSchool, Infinite Campus, Skyward, Aeries and Synergy are the systems of record; roster data is POSTed to our API or pushed via OneRoster or CSV. |
| A learning management system | Permanent | Canvas, Schoology and Google Classroom own that ground. |
| A district website CMS | Permanent | Apptegy and Finalsite compete there. Bundling a CMS into a comms contract is how the renewal number gets hard to read. |
| A payment processor | v2 at the earliest | Specialist vendors are cheaper per transaction, and taking payment from families sits awkwardly beside §9.4. |
| An AI product | Permanent | Machine translation is a model call, and that is one of two narrow places any model appears. The brand is reliability, not AI. |
Six of these seven are permanent and the seventh has a date on it. We publish the list because a scope decision a vendor will not write down is a scope decision that gets sold to you anyway.
The short version
Every spring, K-12 directors of technology open a renewal email. The line item that goes up the most is parent communications. Talk to enough of them and the same shrug comes back: we do not like the vendor, and we cannot switch.
Both halves of that sentence matter. The dislike is ordinary software dissatisfaction and it is survivable. The second half is the problem — switching costs are high enough, and family re-onboarding painful enough, that a district will absorb an unpleasant increase rather than move. Once a vendor knows that, the increase is not a pricing decision, it is a collection mechanism.
That is the gap Kastr is built for. Not "the AI-native operating system for schools" — there are already two of those and CTOs are tired of the demo. Something more boring: a comms tool that does the daily work, does not escalate, does not sell to your families, and lets you leave with your data.
So the price is published on the site, fixed for 36 months in clause §3.2 and capped afterwards at the lesser of CPI-U or 5%. The export right is §7.1 rather than a support policy. The promise never to monetise your families is §9.4. If we are acquired, §11.2 gives every district 90 days to leave with a full export, a prorated refund and no penalty. Those four clauses are the product as much as the software is, because they are the parts a future owner of this company cannot quietly renegotiate.
— Ross, founder
Where we actually are, in August 2026
Small, self-funded, and pre-launch. We are not going to print a team size, a funding round or a customer count, because the honest versions of those numbers are not impressive and the flattering versions would be a strange thing to publish on a site whose entire argument is that vendors should stop doing that.
What is true and checkable: there is a working product with a 28-endpoint REST API, an MIT-licensed CLI and MCP server, a signed-receipt migration importer that anyone can run without our involvement, and a security model documented control by control on the trust page. There is a master agreement and a DPA that we will send you before you talk to anyone. There is a dated changelog that records the compliance items which went against us.
What is equally true: no district is in production. There is no SOC 2 report, no uptime history, no reference call we can arrange, no SSO, no file attachments and no push notifications. We are recruiting design partners for the summer cutover window, and the first cutover has not happened yet.
Anyone telling you a pre-launch vendor is the safe choice is selling. What we can argue is narrower: for a district whose main problem is a renewal number and a contract with no cap in it, the risk of being early is at least legible, and the terms are on a public page rather than in a proposal you receive after two sales calls.
What we will not sell to a future buyer
This category consolidates constantly. ParentSquare acquired Remind. PowerSchool acquired SchoolMessenger and was then taken private itself. The pattern that follows an acquisition is familiar: the price moves, the roadmap changes owners, and the data terms get revised in a version of the agreement nobody in the district reads because the contract auto-renewed.
So the exit right is written into the agreement rather than promised in a blog post. §11.2 triggers on a change of control or a material change to data terms, and gives you 90 days to terminate with a full export, a prorated refund and no penalty. The migration importer is MIT-licensed and runs without us, so the tool you would need on the way out is not one we control. And §9.4 forecloses family monetisation permanently, which is the specific thing a new owner would most likely want to switch on.
None of that makes an acquisition impossible. It makes the terms of one already agreed, in your favour, before there is any pressure to agree them.
How this shows up in the way we work
The price is on the website. $3.50 per student per year under 5,000 students, $3.25 to 14,999, $3.00 above that. One tier, every feature included, no per-message fees. You did not have to book a call to read that.
Bad news ships on the same pages as good news. The comparison pages have a column where we lose six rows. The trust page opens with two red statuses. This page says we have no customers. That is not modesty as a tactic; it is the only way a claim from a company nobody has heard of is worth anything.
Releases follow the school calendar. Major work lands in May with PD materials attached so staff learn it over the summer, and September to May is polish only. A district's capacity to absorb change during a term is close to zero, and shipping into that window is a way of pretending to deliver.
The interesting parts are open source. The importer, the CLI and the MCP server are MIT licensed. If we disappear tomorrow, the tool that gets your data out still runs.
Questions people actually ask
Who is behind Kastr?
A small, self-funded, pre-launch company. Ross is the founder and is the person who answers ross@getkastr.com. We do not publish a team size, a funding figure or a customer count, because the honest versions are unremarkable and inflating them would contradict everything else on this site.
Does Kastr have customers yet?
No. No district is in production, there are no reference calls we can arrange, and the first cutover has not happened. We are recruiting design partners for the summer window. Any page here that implied otherwise was wrong and has been corrected.
What happens to our contract if Kastr is acquired?
§11.2 gives every district 90 days from a change of control — or from any material change to data terms — to terminate with a full export, a prorated refund and no penalty. The importer is MIT-licensed and runs without us, so the tooling you would need on the way out is not under our control either.
Why does Kastr not build a website CMS or payments?
Deliberate scope decisions, listed on this page with the reasoning. Bundling a CMS and payments into a comms contract is how a renewal number becomes hard to read, and specialist vendors are better and usually cheaper at both. Payments is the only item on that list with a date attached, and it is v2 at the earliest.
Is Kastr an AI product?
No. Machine translation is a model call and is one of two narrow places any model appears. There is no AI draft assistant and no translation glossary in the product. The brand is reliability; a district comms tool that behaves unpredictably is worse than one that does less.
One price. Every feature. Locked for three years.
$3.50 per student per year under 5,000 students. No tiers, no add-on modules, no per-message fees. Published on the site because you should not have to book a call to learn a price.