For a single school: when district-grade communication is worth it, and when it is not
Most single schools should not buy a platform built for districts. The overhead is real, the price bands start above you, and a cheaper tool will do the job. This page is the decision criteria, including the cases where the answer genuinely flips.
| Condition | Buy district-grade? | Why |
|---|---|---|
| You must produce contact evidence for truancy or discipline hearings | Yes | An editable log is worth very little in a proceeding; tamper-evidence is the whole point |
| You send emergency notifications that must reach every household in minutes | No | Kastr is not an emergency notification system: no voice channel and no published delivery time. Keep safety-critical alerts in your established emergency system |
| You serve families in several languages | Yes | Pre-send translation preview is not available in consumer tools |
| You have a data privacy agreement obligation to a state or authoriser | Yes | Consumer tools rarely sign a district-form DPA |
| You are a charter under an authoriser that audits communication | Yes | The audit requirement, not the size, is what drives this |
| Staff turnover is high and institutional memory lives in one person's phone | Yes | Shared, logged records survive the person leaving |
| You need one identity for staff who are also parents | Yes | Two-account drift is a per-person problem, not a per-district one |
| Your main need is sharing classroom photos and daily updates | No | We have no attachments, no photo or video sharing at all |
| Teachers want a familiar app parents already have | No | Adoption beats architecture at this scale |
| You have no one to own roster data | Needs an owner | OneRoster can reduce manual integration work, but scope, guardian coverage and sync health still need review |
| Your enrolment is under about 1,000 | No | Published price bands begin at 1,000–4,999 students |
| Nobody will ever ask you to prove what you sent | No | Then you are buying an insurance policy you do not need |
The pricing answer, given plainly rather than routed to a form
Our published bands start at 1,000–4,999 students, at $3.50 per student per year. A 400-student school is below the published structure. We are not going to pretend otherwise, and we are not going to send you to a quote form to find out.
The arithmetic is why. At 400 students the band rate produces $1,400 a year. The cost of onboarding a customer, roster shape, contact hygiene, a data privacy agreement review, the 10DLC registration paperwork, the first term of support, does not scale down with enrolment. A vendor that takes a 400-student school at band pricing either loses money on it or makes it up by underserving it, and the second is more common.
What that means practically: talk to us if the conditions in the table above apply to you, and expect the conversation to be about whether the fit is real rather than about a discount. If your circumstances are ordinary, the honest recommendation is below.
What a single school should probably buy instead
Named without hedging, because a page that lists alternatives and then finds a reason to reject each of them is an advertisement.
- ClassDojo for elementary schools whose need is classroom-level engagement, photos and daily updates. Free at the school level, high parent adoption, weak on district-grade records. Our comparison is at Kastr vs ClassDojo.
- Remind for secondary schools whose need is one-way announcements and teacher-to-family texting. Simple, and priced for a building. See Kastr vs Remind.
- TalkingPoints if translation for a multilingual family base is the dominant requirement and the rest is secondary.
- Your existing SIS's parent portal messaging, which is usually worse than any of the above but is already paid for, already holds the roster, and requires no new agreement. For a school with a modest need this is frequently the right answer and almost never the one a vendor suggests.
If you do buy district-grade, what changes in your week
The shift is from sending to being able to demonstrate sending. Every message is written to an append-only, hash-chained log that records who sent it, to whom, on which channel, and what the carrier reported. That is the artefact that matters in a hearing, an authoriser review or a records request, and it is the one thing a free classroom app fundamentally does not provide.
The second shift is contact hygiene. Contact points carry validation and consent states separately, so "we could not reach them" and "they did not respond" stop being the same row in a report. For a school of 600, this is a fortnight of front-office work once and then a maintained asset.
Someone must own roster quality and sync health. A supported OneRoster REST connection can reduce district-side scripting; CSV ZIP imports are manual, and other export formats may still need a custom API job.
The things that are the same at any size
One tier. There is no small-school edition with the useful things removed. Everything in the product is in the price at every band.
§9.4 applies regardless of size. No marketing to your families, no selling to them, no family-facing subscription revenue, ever. A single school is more exposed to this than a district is, because the free tools available at your scale are frequently the ones funded by parents.
§3.2 and §11.2 apply regardless of size. Price locked 36 months then capped at the lesser of CPI-U or 5%; a 90-day exit with export and prorated refund if we are acquired or materially change data terms.
The gaps apply regardless of size too. No SSO, no voice calls, no push notifications, no attachments, no grade targeting, no auto-notices that fire, no SOC 2 audit, and limited operating history yet.
Questions people actually ask
We have 600 students. Can we buy Kastr?
Our published bands start at 1,000 students, so you are outside the published structure. That is not a soft no with a quote form attached, below about 1,000 students the economics of onboarding do not work at band pricing. If the conditions in the table above genuinely apply to you, the conversation is worth having; if they do not, one of the alternatives listed on this page is a better use of your money.
What do we gain over a free classroom messaging app?
Three things, and nothing else worth paying for: a tamper-evident record of what was sent and to whom, a delivery path with retries and delivery receipts, and contact records that distinguish an unreachable family from an unresponsive one. If none of those are pressing for you, the free app is the correct choice.
Do we need an IT person to run this?
Kastr can read OneRoster 1.1 and 1.2 REST rosters and preview uploaded OneRoster CSV ZIP files. An organisation administrator configures the connection under Integrations, OneRoster. REST sync can run nightly after the first manual apply when the production worker is configured for that organisation. The custom JSON roster API and typed roster CSV import remain separate routes. A standards-based connection does not establish a vendor partnership or certification. Name a school or district owner for connection access, data quality and failed-sync follow-up.
What would make a single school actually need audit logging?
A proceeding. Truancy referrals, discipline hearings, special-education disputes, authoriser reviews and public-records requests all turn on producing evidence of what was communicated and when. If your school participates in any of those regularly, an editable message history is a liability rather than a record.
Is there a small-school edition with fewer features?
No. There is one tier and everything is in it, at every enrolment band. Feature-gated small tiers are how vendors make a low headline price look reasonable, and they are the reason so many districts discover at renewal that the thing they need is in the tier above.
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.