Two school platforms quote you roughly the same monthly figure. Three years later one of them costs four times the other, and nothing about either product has changed — you simply grew, and the two prices were attached to different things. That is the single most consequential fact about software pricing in this market, and it is invisible during an evaluation because every comparison happens at today's size.
This cluster fixes that. The first article sets out the six models vendors use and how each behaves as a school grows. The second covers the costs that never appear on a pricing page — migration, integrations, payment processing, the hours someone spends keeping two systems in step — and gives you a worksheet for comparing at the size you expect to be. The third is the return side: what a platform saves, how to put a number on it without fooling yourself, and how long it takes to pay back.
A price scales with whatever it is attached to. Per active student grows with the school, which is honest and predictable, and it does not punish you for hiring. Per teacher or per seat punishes exactly that, and it is invisible until the term you add three part-time tutors. Per site is fine until the second location. A flat subscription is predictable until you hit the limit it is tiered by. Per lesson or per session scales with how intensively you teach rather than how many students you have, so a school running four sessions a week per student pays double one running two. And a percentage of revenue scales with your prices as well as your size, which makes it the cheapest option when you are small and the most expensive when you have succeeded.
None of these is dishonest and each suits someone. What matters is knowing which one you are buying, because it determines whether growth makes your software cheaper per student or more expensive. The first article works each one through with the arithmetic.
Total cost of ownership for a small school includes at least nine things, and most evaluations count one. Beyond the subscription there is payment processing; any percentage taken from tuition; setup, migration and training; the separate tools the platform does not replace; the integration between them and who maintains it; domains and email; the administrator hours spent reconciling systems that do not talk to each other; and the eventual cost of leaving. That last one is a real number — a migration out costs days of work and sometimes a term of parallel running.
The administrator-hours line is the one schools never count and feel most. Two systems that each work beautifully but do not share a student record cost somebody several hours a week, every week, for as long as you run them. At any reasonable hourly value that is a larger number than most subscriptions, and it is the strongest financial argument for consolidation. The second article turns all nine into a worksheet.
Vendors in this market publish percentages with very little behind them, and a school should discount all of them, including ours. What we will say is limited and sourced: in a one-term pilot at Intellect Academy — our sister school — teachers reported that lesson preparation and grading time fell by roughly half. That is one school, one term, self-reported, and owned by the same company as SprintUp; it is the reason the platform was built as it was, not a prediction for yours.
The number that should decide anything in your school is your own, and getting it takes two surveys a term apart rather than a vendor's case study. The method is in the measuring teacher workload article; the third article here is the financial half — how to convert freed hours into money, what to count as a saving and what not to, and how to calculate a payback period you would be willing to defend to whoever signs the cheque.
SprintUp charges by active students: free for one educator and ten students, permanently; Pro at €29 a month or €261 a year for one educator and up to fifty students; Academy from €99 a month covering the first 25 active students, then €4 each to 100 and €3 beyond, with unlimited teachers. Paying yearly gives twelve months for the price of ten. Every figure is on the pricing page with a calculator, so the year-three arithmetic in this cluster can be done before anyone speaks to a salesperson.
Two things to state rather than leave to be found. SprintUp takes 0% of what your students pay you, on every plan, with standard Stripe processing applying as it would anywhere — so the "percentage of revenue" row in the model table is zero for us. And there is one place we do take a share: the curriculum marketplace, where a creator selling to a school keeps 80% and the platform takes 20%. That is a different transaction from tuition and entirely optional. Where competitors are cheaper on subscription — several are — the comparison pages say so with their published figures.
Understand what you are charged by, count everything the pricing page leaves out, and work out the return with your own numbers rather than anyone's claim.