Six ways to be charged,
and most vendors use two.
School and tutoring platforms are priced in a small number of recognisable shapes, and the important thing is not which is cheapest today but which grows with what. A fee that scales with your student numbers behaves very differently from one that scales with your prices, and a school that raises its fees by twenty percent discovers the difference immediately.
The second row is the one that surprises people. Some platforms apply a percentage to payments they did not process at all — fees a family paid by bank transfer or in cash, entered into the system so the records are complete. It is usually a smaller percentage than the card fee and it is usually documented, in a fee schedule rather than on the pricing page. It is worth asking about specifically, because a school that takes many payments offline can find itself paying for the privilege of recording them.
Cheapest when you are small.
Most expensive when you have succeeded.
Take a percentage fee of two and a half percent on tuition, which is in the range this market charges. A school with forty students paying €500 a term collects €60,000 a year and pays €1,500 — noticeable but not decisive. The same school four years later, with three hundred students paying €600, collects €540,000 and pays €13,500 for the same software, doing the same job. Nothing about the product changed; the school succeeded, and the fee took its share of that success. These are illustrative round numbers, but the shape is the point: the better the school does, the more the percentage costs, with no ceiling and no relationship to the cost of serving it.
This is why the right way to compare platforms is at the size you expect to be in three years, not the size you are during the evaluation. A subscription that looks expensive today and a percentage that looks cheap will often have swapped places by then, and the swap is permanent. Work it out once, on paper, for each product on your shortlist.
Every card costs something.
That is not a platform fee.
Card processing — the fee the payment processor and the card networks take for moving the money — exists everywhere and is not a platform charge. It is worth comparing rates, and worth knowing which processor you are on and what you are paying, but a vendor is not taking a cut of your tuition by passing on a processing fee. Conflating the two is a common mistake in both directions: schools who think a platform is free because they only see the processor's deduction, and schools who think a platform is expensive because the processor's fee appears on the same statement.
The clean question separates them: "Besides payment processing, does the platform take any share of what my students pay me — on card payments, on offline payments, or as an application fee?" Ask it exactly that way and the answer is unambiguous.
Zero on tuition.
Twenty percent in one place, stated.
Students and families pay the school directly through Stripe, on the school's own connected account, and SprintUp takes 0% of that payment on every plan — free, Pro and Academy alike. Standard Stripe processing fees apply as they would with any provider. There is no percentage on offline payments, because SprintUp does not take a percentage of tuition at all.
There is one place where SprintUp does take a share, and it is worth stating plainly rather than leaving it to be discovered: the curriculum marketplace, where one educator sells a course or unit to another school. There the platform fee is 20% and the creator keeps 80%. That is a different transaction — school buying from creator, not student paying school — and it is optional; a school that never buys or sells marketplace curriculum never encounters it.
SprintUp's own price is the subscription: free for one educator and ten students, Pro at €29 a month, Academy from €99 a month priced by active students. That is the whole of what the platform costs, and it is on the pricing page with a calculator, so the year-three arithmetic above can be done before anyone talks to a salesperson.
Five questions,
and get the answers in writing.
These are the questions that settle the fee structure of any platform on your shortlist. Ask them by email rather than on a call, so that the answers exist afterwards.
1. Besides payment processing, does the platform take any share of what students pay us — as a percentage, an application fee, or any other deduction? 2. Is there any fee on payments taken outside the platform and recorded in it? 3. Whose payment account do student payments land in — ours, or yours and then paid over to us? 4. What is the total monthly cost at [your year-three student numbers], including every fee? 5. If we leave, can we export every student, payment and enrolment record, and how?
The third question matters more than it looks. Money landing in the school's own account and money landing in the vendor's account and being remitted later are different risks entirely — the second means your tuition is briefly the vendor's balance, with whatever that implies if their circumstances change. The buyer's guide covers the rest of the evaluation, and the comparison pages carry each vendor's published figures with the date they were checked.