For small districts: one person does all of this, and the platform should assume that
In a district under 2,500 students, the communications platform is usually administered by somebody whose actual job is something else. Every recommendation below assumes nobody is coming to help.
| Enrolment | Annual at $3.50 | 36-month locked total | Per school month | Roughly equivalent to |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1,000 | $3,500 | $10,500 | $389 | Under half a day of substitute cover per month |
| 1,400 | $4,900 | $14,700 | $544 | One district laptop refresh a month |
| 1,800 | $6,300 | $18,900 | $700 | Less than one hour of a superintendent's time per week |
| 2,200 | $7,700 | $23,100 | $856 | A single day of consultant PD per year |
| 2,500 | $8,750 | $26,250 | $972 | — |
Nine-month school year used for the per-month figure. Licence only; carrier SMS and voice usage is passed through and estimated in the composer before each send.
Week one, when you are the only person doing it
The realistic sequence, in order, with the parts that actually take time marked:
- Decide your system of record for contact data. Usually the SIS. This is a policy decision, not a technical one, and getting it wrong means staff corrections are silently overwritten every night. Half an hour of thinking, and it is the highest-leverage half hour in the project.
- Get one roster file across. There are no native SIS connectors, so something you control POSTs to
/api/v1/roster/sync, or your rostering intermediary does. In a small district this is frequently a scheduled export plus a short script. Budget half a day if you have done it before, two days if you have not. - Look at what arrived. Guardian coverage is where small districts find their real problem: how many students have at least one contactable adult with a valid phone number. Count it before you send anything.
- Start 10DLC registration. Brand and campaign registration takes two to six weeks and nothing you do can shorten it. Start it in week one or your go-live date is fiction.
- Send to yourself. Send-test-to-me delivers only to you, prefixed
[TEST]. Do this on every channel you plan to use. - Send one real message to a small audience. A single grade's families, built as a specific-people selection, before you attempt anything district-wide.
- Write down your quiet-hours and emergency policy. Two sentences. Who may flag a message as an emergency, and what qualifies. Quiet hours default to 21:00–07:00 and the emergency flag bypasses them.
That is a week of part-time work, not a project. What it is not is instantaneous, and any vendor telling you a district goes live in an afternoon is describing an account being created, not a district being reachable.
You get the same product as a district of 30,000
One tier, every feature, at every size. There is no small-district edition, no feature that unlocks at 5,000 students, and no module to add later. The API, the CLI, the audit chain, translation, the cost preview and the migration importer are all in the $3.50 rate.
That is unusual in this category and it is worth checking against whatever else you are evaluating. The most common structure elsewhere is an entry tier that looks cheap and excludes the things you will actually need — forms, e-signature, voice calls and automated notices — which appear one tier up. A published $3 headline that becomes $5 the moment you need a permission slip is a $5 product.
The one thing you should check against your own numbers: a small district's telephony spend is dominated by voice, not SMS, because voice minutes cost more than text segments and because failed texts fail over to voice. If a meaningful share of your families are on landlines, model voice first.
Where a district under 1,000 students should look instead
The published bands start at 1,000 students. Below that the per-student arithmetic stops being the right shape — a 400-student district paying $1,400 a year is not a viable customer for a vendor that has to support it, and any vendor pretending otherwise is either subsidising you from somewhere or planning to make the difference up at renewal.
If you are under about 1,000 students, be honest with yourself about what you actually need. A single school with 380 students and one office manager frequently needs a reliable SMS and voice broadcast tool and nothing else, and there are cheaper products that do exactly that. The features that justify a full platform — multi-school hierarchy, role governance, an API, audit chains — are answers to problems you may not have.
Talk to us anyway if you want to; we would rather tell you that you do not need this than sell it to you. That is easier for us to say than for most vendors, because we do not have a quota yet.
What will hurt in a small district specifically
- No native SIS connector. In a district with no full-time technical staff, the roster POST is the hardest part of the whole project. If nobody in your district can write a scheduled job, this platform needs a partner or a rostering intermediary to be practical.
- No SSO. Magic link only. In a small district this is often a non-issue — there is no identity provider to integrate with — but if you have standardised on Google Workspace for staff, expect grumbling.
- No grade or school targeting. Specific people and everyone are the two audiences that resolve. In a two-school district, "everyone" is often close enough; in a five-school district it is not.
- We are pre-launch. No customers, no SOC 2, no references. A small district with no technical redundancy is exactly the sort of district that should weight that heavily.
Questions people actually ask
What does this cost for a district of 1,400 students?
$4,900 a year, at the published $3.50 per-student rate, fixed for 36 months by contract — $14,700 across the initial term. That includes every feature, unlimited staff accounts and unlimited email. Carrier SMS and voice usage is separate and passed through, and the composer estimates it before each send.
How long does setup take if I am the only person doing it?
About a week of part-time work for the platform side, and two to six weeks of waiting for 10DLC brand and campaign registration before real SMS moves at volume. The roster feed is the variable: half a day if somebody in your district has scheduled an export before, a couple of days if not. Start the registration first, because it is the only part you cannot compress.
Do we get fewer features at a smaller size?
No. One tier, everything included, at every enrolment. There is no small-district edition and nothing unlocks at a higher band. The price per student changes at 5,000 and 15,000 students; the product does not.
We are under 1,000 students. Should we buy this?
Probably not, and we would rather say so. The published bands start at 1,000 students, and below that a simpler SMS-and-voice broadcast tool usually covers what you actually need. The things that justify a full platform — hierarchy, role governance, an API, audit chains — solve problems a single-building district often does not have.
What if our SIS cannot export a roster on a schedule?
Then that is your project, not the messaging platform's, and it is worth solving regardless of which vendor you pick. A manual CSV upload works to get started, but a roster nobody refreshes goes stale within a term and stale contact data is the single largest cause of families who never hear from 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.