Pricing for SchoolInsight Financials
2/14/2019
We recently announced our intention to build a financial system. SIS customers use financial systems in their business offices, and would benefit from integration between the two products. We are targeting a beta release this summer, and plan to give demos in June. If you’re actively shopping for a new financial system, we would encourage you to wait for our demo before making a decision.
As part of the process, we need to set pricing for the new offering. Our goal is to provide a good product at an attractive price. We surveyed our customers to gather pricing data for their current software. Based upon data provided by them, we got a pretty good understanding of our competitors’ pricing models. While the data is a little noisy, here’s generally what we found:
Vendor | #Students in District | First Year | Annual Fee |
SDS | <1k | $10k | $4-8k |
SDS | 1k+ | $20k | $8-9k |
PowerSchool | <1k | $20-25k | $10k |
PowerSchool | 1k+ | $50k | $10k |
Skyward | 500-1500 | $30-60k | $10-20k |
Calling out some highlights:
Pricing increases with district size. Larger districts pay more.
Vendors typically charge more for the first year, likely to cover installation and implementation costs. It’s typically double the annual fee, but can be more.
SDS is least expensive, and PowerSchool/Skyward are most expensive.
Some customers pay more than others for the same thing. SDS has the highest pricing variation, and their longtime customers pay more.
We structured our pricing around these observations. Prices are intended to be competitive with the annual subscription fees of the less expensive vendors. We don’t plan on charging extra fees for the first year -- we like to fit nicely into annual budgets. We also strive to generate high customer satisfaction, and don’t feel a need to “lock down” customers with large upfront fees that discourage switching. Here’s our new pricing:
#Students in District | SchoolInsight Financials Annual Fee |
0-400 | $4,000 |
401-800 | $6,000 |
801-1500 | $8,000 |
1501-3000 | $10,000 |
3001+ | Call for pricing |
We plan to start the beta on 7/1/2019, with full product release 1/1/2020. Subscription fees won’t apply until the product is released (in 2020), so customers can try/use the beta at no cost or risk. Since our product is new, we encourage prospective customers to run SchoolInsight Financials in parallel with their existing system. We’ll be giving demos widely in June.
