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The growth tax: why your software bill doubles when you fill your classes
There is a moment in this trade that catches everybody the same way. You spend three years getting from 140 students to 260, and somewhere in there your software bill goes up by a factor you did not agree to and cannot really argue with. Nothing about the software changed.
Per-student pricing is the standard in this industry and it is not a scam. It is a pricing model with a logic: a bigger school gets more value, so it pays more. Plenty of businesses are sold this way.
It is worth understanding what it actually does, because in this trade it lands in an unusual place.
Growth here is not the same as revenue
A school that grows from 150 to 400 students is often not four times more profitable. It is the same rooms, mostly the same hours, one or two more instructors, and considerably more admin. The margin per child usually goes down for a while, because the second studio, the extra insurance and the front-desk hours all arrive before the students do.
Software priced on headcount takes its increase at exactly the moment the school is least able to absorb it. It scales with the thing that costs you money rather than the thing that makes you money.
The tier boundary is worse than the price
The bill does not rise smoothly. It steps. You cross 100 students, or 200, and the price moves to the next band, and it does so on a Tuesday for the sake of one child who signed up.
This produces a genuinely absurd conversation: whether to enroll a child because of what it does to your software bill. Nobody actually declines the child. What they do instead is stop trusting the tool, which is a slower and more expensive outcome.
What to check before you sign anything
Three questions, and none of them are about features.
What is the next tier, and where does it start? Not the price you pay today — the one you pay at the size you are trying to reach.
Does “students” mean active or ever? Some tools count everyone who has ever been in the database, so the count only goes up. If you have been open six years, ask before you migrate.
What happens if you drop back down? A summer where forty families pause is normal in this trade. Whether your bill follows you down is worth knowing in advance.
Why we charge flat, and what it costs you
Ours is $25 a month at forty students and $25 a month at four hundred, and we should be honest that this is a trade, not a favour. A very small school pays proportionally more to us than it would elsewhere. A large one pays a great deal less.
We made that trade because the alternative means selling you the same problem you are trying to solve, and because a price that changes when you succeed is a price you have to think about. This one you can stop thinking about.
What this means for your website
$250 once and $25 a month, whatever size you get to. No bands, no per-student charge, and no percentage of the tuition — the tuition goes straight to your own payment account and never passes through us.
If you leave, we invoice up to the current month and your data exports to CSV. There is no annual lock-in, because a price that needs one is usually a price that would not survive the question.