For the district communications director who owns the message and the blame
You are the person who finds out at 6:40am that the buses are not running, writes the message, translates it, decides who gets it, and answers for the sentence that was ambiguous. Everything below is about the twenty minutes between deciding to send and pressing send.
| Before you press send | What Kastr does | Where it stops |
|---|---|---|
| Know what it will cost | Live per-channel dollar estimate in the composer, updating as you tick channels | SMS is priced at a deliberate 1¢ upper bound, so the estimate is conservative rather than exact |
| Read the translation | Render the draft in up to five languages via DeepL, in the composer, before anyone receives it | Preview only — there is no district glossary and no "see original" footer on the sent message |
| See it as a parent sees it | Send-test-to-me, delivered only to you and prefixed [TEST] | Tests the rendering and the channel, not the audience |
| Send it to the right people | Selecting a student auto-expands to their guardians; ad-hoc selections save as reusable presets | Only "specific people" and "everyone" resolve. Grade, school and route targeting do not work yet |
| Not wake 900 households | Quiet hours default 21:00–07:00, applied at dispatch | Bypassed only by an emergency-flagged send, which is capability-gated |
| Schedule for Friday and mean Friday | Audience is resolved at send time, not at schedule time | Roster changes between now and then are picked up; message text is not re-approved |
| Reach a family whose text failed | SMS falls over to voice on terminal failure, with the failover linked to the original attempt | Failover is per-recipient and per-attempt, not a whole-campaign fallback |
| Know who sent it | Every send is written to a hash-chained append-only audit log; group-identity posts still record the true author | The log proves who acted, not whether the message was any good |
The cost preview is the feature nobody else ships
In our own competitor matrix the row "cost estimate shown before you send" reads, for every named vendor, nobody. That is not a small omission. A communications director is the only person in the district who can control messaging spend at the moment it is incurred, and in most platforms that person is flying blind: the invoice arrives in a quarter, aggregated, attributed to nothing.
Kastr shows a per-channel dollar figure in the composer as you tick channels. Tick SMS for 3,900 guardians and the number appears. Untick it and it goes away. The effect is behavioural rather than technical — people write shorter messages and choose email for the ones that do not need to interrupt anybody, because the trade-off is visible at the moment they are making it.
The figure is deliberately conservative: SMS is estimated at one cent per message, which is an upper bound rather than a blended rate. We would rather your budget conversation started from a number that cannot embarrass you.
Translation you can actually check
The category norm is a translate toggle whose output nobody in the building has read. That is fine until the day a machine translation of "shelter in place" lands in 900 Spanish-speaking homes with the wrong verb, and you find out from a parent.
Kastr renders the draft in up to five languages inside the composer, using real DeepL, before the send exists. You can put the Spanish in front of the bilingual family liaison in the two minutes it takes them to read it.
Two honest limits. First, there is no district glossary — no way to pin "conferencia de padres y maestros" as the correct rendering of your term. We have seen that claim on our own older pages and it was wrong. Second, the number of languages depends on where you look: the composer exposes nine, the family profile ten, the migration importer maps thirteen, and DeepL's own target set is around thirty. There is no single true number, so we cite the surface rather than a marketing figure. Anyone advertising "47 languages" in this category, including us in a previous version of this site, should be asked which forty-seven.
If your district has a language for which no engine is usable — and most districts have at least one — the answer is a human translator and a plan, and the language access guide covers how to decide which languages get which treatment.
Governance without a workflow tool
The question every communications director eventually asks is not "can people send" but "can I find out who sent that". Kastr answers it with the audit log rather than an approval chain: every send, every audience resolution, every moderation action writes an event into a per-organisation SHA-256 hash chain that is append-only at the database-role level as well as the policy level.
Volunteer and PTA groups post under the group's identity while the log records the individual who actually pressed the button, so a parent volunteer can run their group's communications without ever holding a district console login. Family-initiated reports land in a four-outcome moderation queue — dismiss, warn, remove the post, archive the group — and each outcome is logged.
What does not exist: a formal multi-step approval workflow with routing and hold states. If your district requires a superintendent's sign-off before a building message leaves, today you enforce that with people and a policy, not with the software.
The clause about your families
§9.4, non-solicitation. We will not market to your families, sell to your families, or run a family-facing paid tier, ever. It is a contract term, not a value. The reason it is a term is that the largest free product in this category funds itself by charging families for consumer subscriptions inside the same app, and roughly one in twenty converts. That revenue comes out of the same households you are trying to reach about attendance.
The related commitment is the release calendar. Major releases land in May with professional-development packs; September to May is polish only. Nobody in this category productises a change freeze around the school year, and it exists because a platform change in October is your problem, not ours.
Questions people actually ask
Can I see the translation before parents do?
Yes. The composer renders your draft in up to five target languages through DeepL before the message is sent, so a bilingual staff member can read the Spanish or Vietnamese version in the same screen you wrote the English in. There is no district glossary to pin preferred terminology, and no "see original" footer is appended to the delivered message.
How many languages does Kastr actually translate into?
There is no single honest number, so here are the real ones: the composer offers nine, the family profile ten, the migration importer maps thirteen, and DeepL's supported target set is around thirty. Translation is DeepL-powered rather than fixed at a count. If a vendor quotes you a precise large number, ask which languages and where in the product they are selectable.
Can I see what a message will cost before I send it?
Yes, per channel, live in the composer as you select channels. SMS is estimated at a deliberate one-cent-per-message upper bound so the figure never under-states. In our own competitor matrix, the cell for every other named vendor on this row reads "nobody".
If I schedule a message for Friday, who receives it — Friday's roster or Monday's?
Friday's. The audience is resolved at send time, not at schedule time, so a student enrolled on Thursday is included. The honest caveat is that audience resolution does not yet consult enrolment status or suppression flags at send time, so a withdrawn student's guardians are not automatically dropped. Until that ships, treat scheduled sends to large audiences as needing a roster check.
Will Kastr market to our families or sell them anything?
No, and it is clause §9.4 rather than a promise: no marketing to district families, no selling to district families, and no family-facing subscription revenue, ever. If we ever wanted to change that, we would have to renegotiate the contract with you.
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.