One price. All features. Locked for three years.
No tier upsells. No add-on modules. Normal family messaging is included under a published fair-use allowance, with transparent cost recovery only when annual usage exceeds it. The same agreement applies on day one and on day 1,095.
| Enrolment | Per student, per year | Fixed for | Year 4 and beyond | Feature tier |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1,000–4,999 students | $3.50 | 36 months | Lesser of CPI-U or 5% | All of it |
| 5,000–14,999 students | $3.25 | 36 months | Lesser of CPI-U or 5% | All of it |
| 15,000+ students | $3.00 | 36 months | Lesser of CPI-U or 5% | All of it |
The lock and the cap are clause §3.2 of the master agreement, not a marketing promise. Anything we ship during the locked term is included at no extra charge, which is the part that makes the lock safe for us as well as for you.
What three years of an escalating contract actually costs
The first-year number is not the decision. The three-year total is, and the gap between the two is where the money in this category lives. The React version of this page had a slider; a table is more use to you, because you can read it, screenshot it and paste it into a board packet.
| District size | Kastr rate | Kastr, 3-year total | Escalating vendor, year 1 → 2 → 3 | Escalating, 3-year total | Difference |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1,000 students | $3.50 locked | $10,500 | $7,000 → $8,260 → $9,747 | $25,007 | $14,507 |
| 2,500 students | $3.50 locked | $26,250 | $17,500 → $20,650 → $24,367 | $62,517 | $36,267 |
| 5,000 students | $3.25 locked | $48,750 | $35,000 → $41,300 → $48,734 | $125,034 | $76,284 |
| 10,000 students | $3.25 locked | $97,500 | $70,000 → $82,600 → $97,468 | $250,068 | $152,568 |
| 20,000 students | $3.00 locked | $180,000 | $140,000 → $165,200 → $194,936 | $500,136 | $320,136 |
Assumptions, stated so you can argue with them: a $7.00 per-student baseline and an 18% annual increase. Neither figure is a quote we have seen from a named vendor, and we are not attributing them to one. They are the shape of the renewal story districts describe to us. Swap in your own numbers, the arithmetic is per student per year, times enrolment, times three, and it takes a minute in a spreadsheet.
Two things worth noticing. First, the compounding does the damage: at 18% a year the third-year rate is 39% above the first, so a district that models the renewal on year one underestimates the term by roughly a third. Second, the gap grows linearly with enrolment, which means the districts with the least procurement capacity are the ones for whom the difference is smallest in absolute dollars, and the ones with the most are usually already negotiating hard.
Do the version of this that matters. Take your current invoice, divide by enrolment to get a real per-student-per-year figure, and multiply by three at whatever escalation your contract actually permits. If your contract does not name a maximum escalation, use the last three renewals as your estimate. That single number is a better basis for a decision than any feature matrix, including ours.
What the price includes, at every size
There is one tier. A 1,100-student rural district and a 22,000-student county system get the same product; only the per-student rate differs.
| Always included | What we do not sell, at any price |
|---|---|
| Normal SMS and email usage under a pooled annual allowance | Premium, Pro or Enterprise tiers |
| Translation into 30+ languages via DeepL, previewed before send | Marked-up usage fees |
| Two-way conversations, threaded and audit-logged | Parent subscriptions or any family-facing charge |
| Forms and permission slips | Marketplace commissions on services routed to your families |
| Community groups with volunteer governance | An AI Sidekick, AI Newsletter or AI anything |
| Roster sync over the REST API, with the withdraw guardrail | An API access tier, the API is not an upsell |
| 28 REST endpoints, the MIT CLI and the MCP server | Translation overage charges |
| Signed outbound webhooks with an SSRF guard | Premium support plans |
| Hash-chained, append-only audit log | Paid implementation packages |
| The migration importer and its signed receipt | Anything else. That is the entire list. |
| Contractual export rights, any day of the term (§7.1) | |
| Support inside one business day during the school year, same day June to August |
The right-hand column is the commercially interesting one. Every item on it is a revenue line some vendor in this category runs, and each one is a reason a published price stops meaning anything.
The four clauses your renewal email will not have
These are the actual clause numbers. Your counsel will read them; you may as well read them first.
- §3.2 Pricing Commitment
- The per-student price is fixed for the 36-month initial term. Year four and beyond is capped at the lesser of CPI-U or 5% annually. Features added during the locked period are included at no extra charge, which is what stops the lock from quietly becoming a feature freeze.
- §7.1 Data Portability
- You may export all data, messages, forms, audit logs and family contact records at any time during the term, in a machine-readable format, without notice and without fee. This is a contract right, and today we execute it for you on request, same day. Self-serve export tooling ships with the May 2027 release. We are deliberately not calling that one click until the button exists.
- §9.4 Non-Solicitation of End Users
- Kastr will not market, sell or advertise products or services directly to district families through the service, and will not derive revenue from family-facing subscriptions, fees or transaction processing of any kind. This is the clause that makes the per-student price the whole business model rather than the visible part of it.
- §11.2 Change-of-Control Exit Right
- On acquisition, a change of majority ownership, or a material change to data-handling terms, you may terminate within 90 days with a full data export, a prorated refund of the unused term and no early-termination penalty.
Read the full compliance and contract status, or the head-to-head comparison that shows where a larger vendor beats us.
A focused product, without a bundled suite
Kastr is built for school-to-home communication: messages, combined briefings, family tasks, contextual questions, forms, translation and community groups. It connects to the systems your school already uses rather than trying to replace every one of them.
That focus keeps implementation lighter, support direct and the price easy to understand. Website publishing, payments, learning management and the student information system remain with the specialist products schools choose for those jobs. Read more on the why page.
Questions people actually ask
Is there a minimum contract or a setup fee?
No setup fee, no implementation package and no professional-services line. The initial term is 36 months, which is what makes the price lock meaningful in both directions, a one-year lock is just a price. Migration assistance and the signed importer receipt are included rather than quoted.
What happens to the price if our enrolment falls?
You pay per student per year, so the invoice falls with enrolment. If enrolment falls across a band boundary the rate does not worsen; the locked per-student figure from your agreement holds for the full 36 months. This is a question worth asking every vendor on your list, because per-student pricing that only ratchets upward is common.
Why publish a price at all when nobody else in K-12 does?
Because quote-only pricing costs the buyer a sales cycle per vendor before two numbers can be compared, and that cost is the point of it. The largest platform in this category runs a pricing page with three tiers, four add-ons and no dollar figure anywhere. Publishing ours removes our own ability to price to your budget, which is a real commercial concession and the reason it is credible.
How does the messaging allowance work?
Normal school communication is included in the per-student price. The allowance is pooled across the school and the full contract year, so a busy month does not create a surprise charge. We notify administrators at 70% and 85% with a usage forecast. Above 100%, messages continue and Kastr recovers only the marginal provider and carrier cost plus the published variance buffer. Urgent and safeguarding communication is never blocked. Schools using their own messaging provider do not pay Kastr cost recovery for that traffic.
What is the maximum you can raise the price in year four?
The lesser of CPI-U or 5%, written into clause §3.2 as a number rather than a commitment to be reasonable. If a vendor will not put their maximum annual increase in the agreement, the practical answer to what it will be is whatever the renewal conversation supports.
Switching is a weekend, and you get a receipt.
Our ParentSquare importer is MIT-licensed and runs without us. It validates your export, normalises phone numbers and languages, drops the junk guardian records, and emits a signed PDF receipt with a per-file SHA-256 manifest, a procurement artefact, not a developer log.