Open research on how districts buy school communications
Everything in this programme is built from documents a member of the public can already obtain: board agenda packets, awarded contracts, state cooperative databases, primary statute text, vendor terms pages and signed data privacy agreements filed in public registries. We have no customers, so we have no usage data, and we will never present a finding that depends on one.
| Asset | Unit of analysis | Primary source class | First edition | Refresh | Licence |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| K-12 Communications Pricing Index | Awarded contract or purchase order | Board packets, state co-op databases, check registers | Autumn 2026 | Annual, August–October pull | CC BY 4.0 |
| Vendor Data Ownership Scorecard | Contract clause | Vendor MSAs, public DPA registries, terms pages | Autumn 2026 | Annual, with clause diff | CC BY 4.0 |
| Parent Notification Law Tracker | State × notice category | Statute and administrative code text | Rolling from launch | Monthly change log | CC BY 4.0 |
| Renewal Escalation Study | Matched district–vendor contract pair | Board packets across two or more contract years | Winter 2026–27 | Annual, panel compounds | CC BY 4.0 |
| RFP Requirements Analysis | Coded RFP document | Public procurement portals, district purchasing pages | Winter 2026–27 | Annual, +100–150 documents | CC BY 4.0 |
| Translation Quality Audit | Message × engine × reviewer | Publicly posted district messages, live engine APIs | Spring 2027 | Annual re-run, fixed corpus | CC BY 4.0 |
| Family-Facing Monetisation Audit | Vendor family-facing property | App-store metadata, published privacy labels, network scan | Spring 2027 | Annual, year-over-year diff | CC BY 4.0 |
| Vendor Ownership Map | Corporate entity and acquisition event | SEC EDGAR, state registry filings, deal announcements | Spring 2027 | Quarterly change log | CC BY 4.0 |
| State of District Procurement survey | Survey respondent | Original fielded instrument, pre-registered | 2027 | Annual, fixed core module | CC BY 4.0 |
| District SMS cost model | Message, segment and rate card | Published carrier and aggregator rate cards | Live now | Quarterly rate re-verification | CC BY 4.0 |
Windows are commitments, not aspirations. If an edition slips, the slip and its reason are posted on this page rather than the date quietly moving.
Why a vendor is publishing this at all
The honest answer is that it is the only research programme we could run that would also be good for us. We publish our own price. Every competitor in this category treats price as a thing you discover in a call. An index of what districts actually pay is therefore an argument for us that is made entirely out of other people's documents, and we would rather make it that way than in a comparison table nobody believes.
The same logic holds for the data-ownership scorecard, which grades our own contract on the same rubric as everyone else's, and for the RFP analysis, which names the common procurement requirements Kastr does not meet. We do not offer SSO, SAML, OIDC or MFA of any kind — a magic link is the only way to sign in to Kastr — and that fails a requirement line that appears in a large share of district RFPs. Publishing that against our own dataset is the point. A scorecard where the author always wins is a brochure.
The commercial risk is obvious and we accept it. A district that reads the pricing index and concludes its incumbent is fairly priced has been well served by this site, and we would rather be the reason it knows that than the reason it does not.
What we publish before we publish findings
Every asset here follows the same order of operations, and the order is the credibility mechanism.
- The instrument first. The rubric, codebook, survey questionnaire or scoring anchors go up before a single row is collected against them. You cannot accuse a codebook of being written backwards from a conclusion if it was published before the conclusion existed.
- The source register. Named sources, not "public records". Which board-packet platforms, which cooperative databases, which state portals, which registries, and what each one actually yields.
- The exclusion count. Every document we pulled and did not use, and why. A corpus reported only as "300+ contracts" is a marketing number.
- The raw rows. The dataset is released with the report, not after it, and not in exchange for an email address. There is no gate on anything in this programme.
- The corrections log. Versioned, additive, and never a silent edit. A prior version stays retrievable after it has been superseded, because a citation to it should not rot.
Right of reply, and how we treat named vendors
Several of these assets name companies and quote their contracts. That imposes obligations, and we would rather state them in advance than improvise them under a legal letter.
- Every named vendor receives the full text of its own rows, in final draft, ten business days before publication.
- Any response is published verbatim beside the finding. Not summarised, not excerpted, not moved to an appendix. A vendor that disagrees with a score gets to say so on the same page as the score.
- Findings are stated as dated observations against a named document. "As retrieved on this date, this clause said this." Never as intent, never as motive.
- Declining to respond is not a way out of a score. Everything is graded from documents the vendor has already published or filed, so nobody can abstain their way to a blank cell.
- A demonstrated factual error is corrected within two business days, the correction is logged with a timestamp, and the original text stays visible with a strike so that anyone who cited it can see what changed.
Citation and reuse. Everything in this programme is CC BY 4.0. Chart it, re-cut it, put it in a board deck, embed the table on a district website, use it in an RFP justification memo, teach with it. Attribution is "Kastr Research" plus the edition and a link. Commercial reuse is fine, including by a competitor. If a competing vendor wants to republish the pricing index with its own row highlighted, that is permitted and we will not object.
Who this is built for, and who we would like to see cover it
The primary reader is a district administrator preparing to buy, renew or defend a communications platform in front of a board. The secondary reader is anybody who writes about this market and currently has no numbers to write with.
There is a real gap in trade coverage here. K-12 Dive, EdWeek, District Administration, eSchool News, EdSurge and THE Journal all cover district technology procurement and all currently have to write about school communications pricing without a price. Association audiences — CoSN, NSPRA, CETPA, TCEA and the state CTO groups — run sessions on exactly these questions every year. Any of them may use this material without asking, and journalists working to a deadline can have the underlying rows and the chart files by email rather than through a form.
Embargoed pre-release access is available to reporters on request, on standard terms: the material is provided in advance, publication is held to an agreed time, and we do not ask for copy approval or to see questions in advance.
Questions people actually ask
Can I republish or chart Kastr's research data commercially?
Yes. Everything in the programme is licensed CC BY 4.0, which permits commercial reuse and derivative work, including re-analysis that contradicts ours. The only requirement is attribution to Kastr Research with the edition name and a link back to the asset. You do not need to ask, and there is nothing to sign.
How do you source district contract prices without customer data?
Awarded contracts in public education are public documents. They appear in board agenda packets and minutes, in state cooperative purchasing databases, in state transparency and checkbook portals, in district check registers, and where a gap matters enough, in a targeted public-records request. Enrollment for the per-student denominator comes from the federal Common Core of Data for the matching school year. No step in that chain touches a customer, which is convenient, because we do not have any.
How do I request a correction, or exercise right of reply as a named vendor?
Write to us with the document and the passage you say we misread. Vendors named in an asset also receive their own rows ten business days before publication and can respond then; the response is published verbatim alongside the finding. A demonstrated error is corrected within two business days, logged with a timestamp, and the superseded text remains visible rather than being quietly replaced.
Do you offer embargoed pre-release access to journalists?
Yes, on ordinary terms. You get the report, the underlying dataset and the chart files ahead of the publication time, and we do not ask for copy approval, advance sight of your questions, or a guarantee of coverage. There is no exclusivity requirement and no obligation to mention Kastr the product.
How often is each dataset refreshed, and do you keep prior editions live?
Cadence is stated per asset in the table above and ranges from monthly for the notification-law tracker to annual for the survey. Prior editions stay live at their own URLs permanently. A dataset whose old edition disappears is a dataset nobody can safely cite, and the entire value of a recurring benchmark is that the earlier number stays where you left it.
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.