For district CFOs and business officials: a communications line item you can forecast
You cannot budget for a number you have to request. This page contains the whole price list, the assumptions behind the usage-variable portion, and a five-year model you can rebuild in a spreadsheet in four minutes.
| Enrolment | Rate | Yr 1–3 (locked) | Yr 4 worst case | Yr 5 worst case | 5-year worst case |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1,200 | $3.50 | $4,200 each | $4,410 | $4,631 | $21,641 |
| 2,500 | $3.50 | $8,750 each | $9,188 | $9,647 | $45,085 |
| 4,800 | $3.50 | $16,800 each | $17,640 | $18,522 | $86,562 |
| 6,200 | $3.25 | $20,150 each | $21,158 | $22,215 | $103,823 |
| 11,000 | $3.25 | $35,750 each | $37,538 | $39,414 | $184,202 |
| 18,000 | $3.00 | $54,000 each | $56,700 | $59,535 | $278,235 |
| 30,000 | $3.00 | $90,000 each | $94,500 | $99,225 | $463,725 |
Worst case assumes the full 5% cap in years four and five; the contractual cap is the lesser of CPI-U or 5%, so at 2.5% inflation the real figures are lower. Normal SMS and email usage is included in these figures under the fair-use allowance discussed below.
What is in the number and what is not
The per-student rate covers the platform: every feature, every user, every school in the district, unlimited staff seats, translation, the API, the CLI, support and onboarding. There is no implementation fee, no training fee, no premium tier and no module that unlocks later.
Normal SMS and email usage is included under a pooled annual fair-use allowance. Schools receive forecasts and notices before reaching it. Above the allowance, messages continue and Kastr recovers only the marginal provider and carrier cost plus the published variance buffer.
The composer does not show a cost estimate. What it shows before each send is the reach: the recipient count and the channels chosen. For a forecast, the number that matters is how many texts go out across a year, and the next section builds that from send events.
Forecasting telephony before you have a year of data
Build it from send events rather than from message counts, because a single district-wide send fans out to thousands of segments.
- Count your sends, not your messages. A typical district sends 2–5 district-wide messages a month, plus 4–10 building-level messages per school per month, plus attendance and operational traffic.
- Multiply by reachable guardians, not students. Most students have between 1.3 and 1.9 contactable guardians. Using student count under-states your fan-out by a third.
- Multiply by segments, not messages. A plain-text SMS carries 160 characters. A message with a curly apostrophe or an emoji drops to 70 characters per segment, so a two-line message can silently cost three times what you modelled. The SMS cost guide works through the boundaries.
- Assume email is free and voice is not. Kastr has no voice channel, so voice is not part of this line. If your district places voice calls through another system, budget those minutes there: voice is the expensive channel, and on platforms that fail texts over to voice it grows quietly when SMS delivery is poor.
A defensible first-year telephony line for a 5,000-student district is a range rather than a point estimate, and the honest way to present it to a board is as a range with the assumptions attached. Then measure the first semester and replace the estimate with your own data.
The renewal risk you are actually buying against
The pattern to model. A district signs at a defensible rate. Renewal arrives with a high-teens increase. Switching costs a summer of staff time nobody budgeted, so the increase is absorbed, and it happens again two years later. Compounded, that is where the money goes, not in the first-year quote every finance committee scrutinises.
The defence is a written cap. §3.2 fixes our rate for 36 months and limits year four onwards to the lesser of CPI-U or 5%. If you are evaluating other vendors, ask each of them to write their maximum annual increase into the agreement as a number. The ones that decline have told you something useful about the renewal you are signing up for, and it costs you nothing to ask.
The related question for your procurement office is auto-renewal. Note the notice window in your current agreement in your own calendar system, ninety days ahead of the deadline, today. The most common reason a district accepts an increase it did not want is that the window closed while the email sat unread. The renewal negotiation guide covers what to do when it has already landed.
Documents your procurement office will ask for
Everything below exists as a document rather than a promise, and none of it requires a call:
- The published price list, per band, with no quote gate.
- The master agreement, including §3.2 price lock, §7.1 export right, §9.4 non-solicitation and §11.2 change-of-control exit.
- A data privacy agreement, and a sub-processor list. Being straight: our published sub-processor lists have been inconsistent across pages and we are reconciling them. Supabase, Resend and DeepL are wired into the running system today, and so is SMS through Bandwidth, switched on per school once it is set up. That is what a DPA conversation should be based on.
- The architecture answers your technology director needs, on the technology director page.
- A written statement of what we have not built, which is on the same page rather than omitted from it.
What we cannot supply: a SOC 2 report, a VPAT, an insurance certificate at enterprise limits, or customer references. We are independently operated. If your purchasing policy makes any of those mandatory, we fail your process this cycle and it is better to know in week one.
Questions people actually ask
What is the price for a district of 6,200 students?
$3.25 per student per year, so $20,150 annually, fixed for 36 months by §3.2, $60,450 across the initial term. From year four, increases are capped at the lesser of CPI-U or 5%, making the worst legal case $21,158 in year four. Normal SMS and email usage is included under the annual fair-use allowance, with transparent cost recovery above it.
Is there an implementation fee, a per-message fee, or a premium tier?
No implementation fee or premium tier. Normal messaging is included under the pooled annual fair-use allowance. Above it, Kastr recovers the marginal provider and carrier cost plus the published variance buffer, with usage and forecasts visible before a charge begins.
What is the worst-case price in year five?
Your locked rate compounded by 5% twice, because years one to three are fixed and years four and five are each capped at the lesser of CPI-U or 5%. For a 4,800-student district that is $18,522 in year five against $16,800 in year one, and the five-year total worst case is $86,562. If CPI-U runs below 5%, the cap binds lower.
How do we forecast SMS usage before we have a year of data?
Estimate sends per month, multiply by contactable guardians rather than students, typically 1.3 to 1.9 per student, then multiply by expected segments per message, which is one per 160 plain characters and one per 70 if any non-GSM character is present. Present it to the board as a range with the assumptions listed, and replace it with measured data after one semester.
Can we pay from Title I or another restricted fund?
That depends on your state and the specific use, and we are not the right people to opine on your allowability determination. What we can do is give you a line-item description that a fund review can evaluate: a district-wide family communication platform licensed per enrolled student, with no family-facing charge and no advertising. Communications platforms are generally not E-rate eligible services, which surprises districts often enough to be worth stating.
One price. Every feature. Locked for three years.
$3.50 per student per year under 5,000 students. No tiers or add-on modules. Normal messaging is included under a published fair-use allowance, with transparent cost recovery only above it.