Assume good faith.
Ask again anyway.
Most people selling school software believe in what they sell and are not trying to mislead anyone. The answers below are not deceptions; they are the natural shortcuts of someone who has given the same presentation two hundred times and has learned which phrasings keep a meeting moving. The problem is that the phrasings which keep a meeting moving are precisely the ones that leave out the cost, the limitation or the dependency — and a school that does not ask again will discover all three later.
So the posture is not suspicion. It is a second question, asked pleasantly, and a preference for written answers over spoken ones. A vendor who is telling you the truth loses nothing by putting it in an email.
Four that cost money.
The second row is the one that matters most and gets the least scrutiny, because a percentage sounds small when spoken and is the largest number on the invoice once a school has grown. "A small transaction fee" can mean a share of every payment your families make, and in some products it applies to payments the platform did not even process. Get the number, the base it applies to, and whether it appears in the contract or only in a fee schedule. Then price it at your year-three tuition, which is the arithmetic in the 0% commission article.
The fourth is the mildest and still worth naming. Time-limited discounts on a decision you will live with for five years are a technique, not an offer, and the correct response is to ask for the standard price and take the extra week.
Four that cost time
or freedom.
"There is an integration" is the answer that has cost small schools the most over the years. An integration is a product, built and maintained by someone, and in a school with no IT staff that someone is the administrator, in the evenings, when it stops working after an update. Ask who built it, whether it is supported by the vendor or by a third party, what it costs, and what happens when the other system changes. If the honest answer is "a partner built it and they charge separately", that is a real answer and it belongs in the total cost.
"That is on the roadmap" should be treated as a no, not out of cynicism but because roadmaps genuinely change as companies learn. Evaluate the product that exists today; if it is a yes without the roadmap item, buy it, and treat the item as a possible improvement. If it is only a yes with the item, you are buying a promise.
Three about
how they behave.
These matter more than they look, because they are the only preview you get of what the relationship will be like after the money changes hands. A sales process that applies pressure, escalates instead of answering, or treats a reasonable question as unusual is showing you its instincts. A school will ask this company awkward questions for years — about an outage, a bill, a data request — and the behaviour on display now is the behaviour you will get then, minus the incentive to impress you.
Where we would fail
our own test.
It would be easy to publish this list and hope nobody applies it to SprintUp. So, specifically: if you ask us "can a parent's data be exported and erased?" the honest answer is yes, and today those operations are run by us rather than by your administrator — which means your response window depends partly on us. That is exactly the kind of thing this article tells you to dig for, and it is set out with what to ask about turnaround in the vendor questions article.
Two more for completeness. We are not an accounting or payroll system, so a school with staff will run one alongside us; anyone implying a platform replaces your accountant is exhibiting a flag of their own. And our comparison pages say where competitors are cheaper — Teach 'n Go, TutorBird and Teachworks all are, on subscription, at most sizes — because a comparison page that finds the publisher wins every row is not a comparison. Apply the list to us as hard as to anyone else; we would rather answer the questions now than lose a school in month six.