See Kastr running on your district's data
Bring a ParentSquare, Apptegy or SchoolMessenger export and we will show you the migration, the composer and the locked-price contract in one 30-minute call. There is no deck. We are pre-launch and recruiting design partners for the summer cutover window, so this page describes what that actually involves.
| Minutes | What happens | What you need to bring | What you leave with |
|---|---|---|---|
| 0–5 | You talk, we listen. Renewal date, enrolment, current vendor, what specifically is broken. | Nothing | An early answer on whether we are a fit, including a "no" if that is the honest one. |
| 5–15 | Your export goes through the open-source importer, live. Counts reconciled against source, phone numbers normalised to E.164, languages mapped, duplicate contact points merged, junk guardian records itemised. | An export bundle from your current vendor. A redacted or partial one is fine. | A signed migration receipt: a PDF with a per-file SHA-256 manifest, an HMAC signature over the bundle hash, source-versus-imported counts, and a ledger of every dropped record with its reason. Yours to keep whatever you decide. |
| 15–25 | A real broadcast composed in front of you: per-channel cost estimate updating as you tick channels, translation previewed in several languages before anything sends, send-test-to-me, and scheduling where the audience resolves at send time rather than schedule time. | Nothing | An honest read on how many clicks your front-office staff would spend per message. |
| 25–30 | The contract on screen: §3.2 price lock, §7.1 export right, §9.4 no family monetisation, §11.2 change-of-control exit. | Your hardest procurement question | The master agreement and DPA by email that afternoon, unredacted, with no NDA required to read them. |
One caveat on the middle segment, stated before the call rather than during it: the importer validates your export and produces the receipt. It does not write rows into a live tenant — that step happens with us during onboarding. It is a dry-run validator and a procurement artefact, and that is exactly what we will show you.
What a design partner actually is
We use the phrase carefully, because in this industry it often means "customer who pays full price and gets called a partner". Here it means a district that is going to be in the room while the product is finished, and that gets something concrete for the inconvenience of being early.
What we ask of you: a real export to test against, roughly an hour a fortnight during the build-out, and honesty when something is bad. Design partners see the roadmap before it is a roadmap and get asked to argue with it.
What you get: the published price locked for the full 36 months under §3.2 regardless of what our list price does later, direct access to the person building the thing rather than a support queue, and priority on the gaps that matter to you. If SSO is your blocker, being a design partner is the most direct way to influence when it lands.
What you should be wary of: you would be betting part of a school year's family communication on a vendor with no production history. That is a real risk and a reasonable board might decline it. Districts that take this well tend to run us alongside an incumbent for a term rather than cutting over cold.
Who this call is for, and who it is not for
We would rather disqualify ourselves in thirty minutes than in month four of an implementation. The call is likely to be worth your time if:
- You are a district of roughly 1,000 students or more, and comms is a line item you can see clearly in the budget.
- Your renewal lands between now and next spring, and you want a comparison number before the incumbent's quote arrives.
- You mostly use broadcasts, two-way messaging, translation and forms — and are paying suite pricing for those four things.
- Somebody on your team wants an API. Ours is 28 documented endpoints with an MIT-licensed CLI and an MCP server, and that is unusual in this category.
Do not book it if a completed SOC 2 report, SSO, file attachments or push notifications are hard requirements — we have none of those, and our trust page sets out exactly where each one stands. Do not book it if you need reference calls with districts your size; we have no customers to refer you to. Do not book it if you want a single vendor for website, payments, attendance and comms, because that is a coherent strategy and it is not ours.
Timing, because it decides more than the software does
Cut over between school years, not during one. A June or July cutover gives office staff the summer to learn the tool and lets family re-onboarding ride the back-to-school attention spike, when families are already opening things from school. A mid-year cutover asks families to re-onboard when nothing has their attention and asks the front office to learn new software in the week they are chasing attendance.
That maps onto how we ship. Major releases land in May with the professional-development materials attached, so teachers learn over the summer; September to May is polish, fixes and documentation, never a surprise feature dropped into a term. If you are evaluating now, the practical sequence is a call this month, an export validated in the same call, contract review over the autumn, and a cutover in the following June or July.
No deck, and no gate. There is no slide presentation, no discovery call before the demo call, and nothing on this site behind a form — the price list, the master agreement and the DPA are all public or one email away. If thirty minutes with your own data is not the fastest way to evaluate us, we have built the wrong company.
How to book
Email ross@getkastr.com with your district name, approximate enrolment, current vendor and renewal month. That is enough to prepare properly, and it goes to the founder rather than a routing queue. A 30-minute slot is at cal.com/kastr/intro if you would rather pick a time directly.
Attach or link an export if you have one to hand and want the migration segment run live; a partial or redacted bundle works fine for that purpose. If you would rather not send district data to a vendor you have not signed with yet — a sound instinct — the importer is MIT-licensed and runs locally without a Kastr account, so you can generate the receipt yourself first and bring the PDF instead.
Replies come the same business day during the school year, and same day between June and August. If you do not hear back by close of the next business day, email again and say so; that is a failure on our side, not on yours.
Questions people actually ask
What happens on the demo call?
Thirty minutes, four segments: five minutes on your situation, ten running your own export through the open-source importer to produce a signed migration receipt, ten composing a real broadcast with live per-channel cost estimates and translation preview, and five on the actual contract clauses. No slides, and the receipt is yours whatever you decide afterwards.
Do we have to send you our district data first?
No. The importer is MIT-licensed and runs locally without a Kastr account, so you can generate the migration receipt yourself and bring the PDF. If you would rather we ran it live, a partial or redacted export bundle is enough to make the segment useful.
What do design partners get that later customers do not?
The published price locked for the full 36 months under §3.2 regardless of later list price changes, direct access to the person building the product rather than a support queue, and priority influence over which gaps close first. In exchange we ask for a real export to test against, about an hour a fortnight, and blunt feedback.
Is there a free trial or a pilot?
The practical equivalent is running us alongside your incumbent for a term rather than cutting over cold, which is what we recommend to any district nervous about betting a school year on a pre-launch vendor. The importer and the migration receipt cost nothing to try today and require no contract at all.
When should we actually switch platforms?
June or July, between school years. It gives the front office the summer to learn the tool and lets family re-onboarding ride the back-to-school attention spike. If a renewal date forces a mid-year decision, a short bridging extension with the incumbent to land the cutover in summer is a normal procurement conversation.
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.