Four things.
That is the whole requirement.
The third row is the one to protect above the others. Video can be replaced in an afternoon and payment providers can be switched with a week of irritation, but the record of who your students are, what level they reached and what they attended is the school itself. If it lives in a spreadsheet on one person's laptop, or scattered across four tools that each know a fragment, then the school is one resignation or one hard-drive failure away from a very bad month.
The fourth row contains the question schools ask last and should ask first: not what the subscription costs, but what proportion of your tuition the platform takes. A percentage sounds trivial when quoted and becomes the largest line on the invoice once the school grows, which is the defining property of revenue-linked pricing — cheapest when you are small, most expensive once you have succeeded.
Language teaching
has one hard requirement.
Any competent video tool will carry a lesson. For language teaching there is one feature that is not optional, which is working small groups, because the entire case made in the first article depends on students spending most of the hour talking to each other rather than to the teacher. A video product without usable breakout rooms will push your classes back into a teacher-fronted shape whatever your intentions are.
Beyond that, the things that matter are unglamorous and easy to test before you commit. Can a student join without installing anything? Does it work properly on a phone, which is how a meaningful share of adult learners will attend? Is the link stable per class, or does somebody have to distribute a new one each week — the single most reliable generator of administrative noise in online schools? And does joining the class start from the same place the student finds their materials, or are they hunting through email for a link three minutes after the hour?
One system, or five
held together by hand?
The four requirements can be met by one product or by several. The case for several is that each is best in class. The case against is that every boundary between tools is a place where the same student has to exist twice, and somebody has to keep the two copies agreeing — which is a job, performed weekly, by a person whose time is not free even when it is unpaid.
The cost is invisible at purchase and obvious in year two. A student enrols in one place, is added to a class in another, gets a payment record in a third and an attendance record in a fourth, and the moment they change their surname or leave mid-term, four things must be updated and one of them will not be. When vendors say "there is an integration for that", ask who built it, who maintains it, what it costs, and what happens when one side changes — the red flags article is specifically about that answer. For a school with no technical staff, the honest default is fewer systems, even at the price of each being merely good rather than best.
Four purchases
to decline politely.
The third row deserves a word, given that we sell AI features ourselves. "AI" is not a capability any more than "software" is, and a product whose main claim is the category rather than a task is asking you to buy an impression. The questions that separate the two are simple: which specific job does it do, what does the output look like, who reviews it before it reaches a student, and what happens when it is wrong. Anything that cannot answer those is not ready, whoever is selling it.
Four things in one place.
Not your accountant.
For completeness, since this article is published by a vendor: SprintUp covers the four. A school website built from templates, on a free address or your own domain, with the pages families read. Live classes with breakout rooms, and a student portal where the class and its materials are the same place. Enrolment, levels, classes and attendance as one record. And card payments through Stripe on the school's own connected account — bank transfer as well on Academy — with 0% taken by us from what students pay you, standard Stripe processing fees applying as they would anywhere.
What it is not: an accounting system or a payroll system. A school with staff runs one of those alongside, and any vendor implying a platform replaces your accountant is exhibiting a flag of its own. Prices are on a page rather than in a quote — free for one educator and ten students, €29 a month on Pro, from €99 on Academy — and the total cost article shows how to compare that against alternatives properly, including the cases where competitors come out cheaper.