For superintendents: the vendor conversation you can take to the board without a slide deck
You will spend less than an hour on this decision, and most of that hour will be spent asking whether it creates risk. So this page leads with the contract rather than the product, and ends with the reasons not to buy.
| Clause | What it commits us to | Why it is unusual |
|---|---|---|
| §3.2 — price lock | Per-student rate fixed for 36 months. From year four, annual increase capped at the lesser of CPI-U or 5%. Features shipped during the term are included at no extra charge. | No named competitor publishes a maximum increase as a number. The renewal is where the money is made in this category. |
| §7.1 — data portability | Right to export everything, machine-readable, at any time, without notice and without fee. | It is a right, not a feature. Today we run the export for you; there is no self-serve button, and we say so. |
| §9.4 — non-solicitation | No marketing to your families, no selling to your families, no family-facing paid tier, ever. | The largest free product in the category charges families instead. This clause makes that business model contractually unavailable to us. |
| §11.2 — change of control | If we are acquired or materially change data terms, you may terminate within 90 days with export and a prorated refund, no penalty. | Districts inherit acquisitions constantly and almost never have an exit. This clause is the one we would ask for if we were you. |
The one-page version for a consent agenda
If you need three sentences for a board packet, these are the honest ones.
Kastr is a K-12 school-to-home communications platform priced at $3.50 per student per year below 5,000 students, $3.25 to 14,999, and $3.00 at 15,000 and above, with every feature included at every size and no add-on modules or per-message fees. The rate is fixed for 36 months by contract, with year four onwards capped at the lesser of CPI-U or 5%, and the agreement includes a data-export right, a prohibition on marketing to district families, and a 90-day exit right if the company is acquired. Kastr is a pre-launch vendor with no completed SOC 2 audit and no existing district customers; the district is evaluating it as a design partner rather than as an established supplier.
That last sentence is the one most vendors would ask you to leave out. Leave it in. A board that discovers it later will trust the recommendation less than a board that was told.
The five-year arithmetic, since that is the actual question
Take a 4,200-student district. The published rate is $3.50, so year one is $14,700. Years two and three are also $14,700, because §3.2 fixes them. Year four's worst legal case is a 5% increase to $15,435, and year five's is $16,207. Five-year worst case: $74,442.
Now model the pattern districts describe to us: a comparable platform at a similar entry rate, with renewal increases in the high teens because there is no cap and the alternative is a migration nobody budgeted. At 18% compounding from year two, the same district pays roughly $14,700, $17,346, $20,468, $24,152 and $28,499 — about $105,000 over the same five years, and the last year alone is nearly double the first.
The difference is not the headline rate. It is whether the ceiling is written down. Ask every vendor on your shortlist, including us, the same question: will you put your maximum annual increase in the agreement as a number? It costs nothing to answer yes.
Reasons not to buy Kastr
Any of these should stop the conversation. We would rather lose the deal in August than fail an implementation in November.
- You require single sign-on. We have none — no SAML, no OIDC, no MFA. Magic link is the only way in.
- Your board requires a completed SOC 2 Type II. We have not been audited.
- You need reference calls with districts like yours. We have no customers. We can offer you code, contracts and architecture, not referees.
- Teachers need to send photos and attachments. Not built.
- You depend on automated attendance or lunch-balance notices firing on their own. Rules configure; no engine runs them yet.
- You want a single vendor for website, payments, attendance and communications. We deliberately do only communications, and a bundle is a coherent reason to choose someone else.
- You need grade-level, school-level or bus-route targeting. Only "specific people" and "everyone" resolve today.
What is left, if none of those disqualify you, is a platform where the price is public, the contract caps the increase, the architecture is described in enough detail for your technology director to verify, and the failure modes are on this page rather than in a demo.
What you are actually being asked to approve
Not a product decision. A risk decision with three components: the money, the data, and the exit.
The money is capped by §3.2 and published on one page with no quote required. The data is governed by §7.1, which makes leaving a contractual right rather than a negotiation, and by §9.4, which makes monetising your families contractually unavailable to us. The exit is §11.2, which turns the most common event in education technology — acquisition — from something that happens to you into something you can respond to inside 90 days.
Everything else on this site is verifiable detail underneath those three. Your technology director will want the architecture page; your business official will want the cost model. Both are written to be read without us in the room.
Questions people actually ask
What does this actually cost for a district our size, before I ask for a quote?
Multiply your enrolment by $3.50 below 5,000 students, $3.25 from 5,000 to 14,999, or $3.00 at 15,000 and above. That is the whole calculation — there is no implementation fee, no per-message charge, no premium tier and no module to add later. A 4,200-student district pays $14,700 a year and $44,100 across the locked 36-month term.
What happens if Kastr is acquired?
Clause §11.2 gives you a 90-day window to terminate with a full export and a prorated refund, with no penalty, on a change of control or a material change to data terms. It applies to an acquisition of the company and to a private-equity recapitalisation. We wrote it because districts inherit acquisitions constantly and are almost never given a way out.
Will our families be marketed to, upsold, or sold a paid tier?
No, under §9.4. No marketing to district families, no selling to district families, and no family-facing subscription revenue at any point. The clause exists because the alternative business model in this category — charging families directly for a better version of their child's school communication — is one we think districts should be able to rule out in writing.
What do I tell the board about data ownership?
That the district owns its data and holds a contractual export right under §7.1 — machine-readable, at any time, without notice or fee. Be precise about the mechanism: there is no self-serve export screen in the product today, so the export is produced on request. The right does not depend on the button.
Is it defensible to recommend a pre-launch vendor?
Only with the risk stated. We have no customers, no SOC 2 audit, no SSO and no push notifications. The defensible framing is a design-partner relationship with a capped price, a contractual exit and an export right — not a claim of maturity we cannot support. If your board would not accept that framing, the honest answer is that we are the wrong vendor this cycle.
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.