Why School Software Costs Keep Climbing (And What To Do About It)

Every year, the invoices arrive.

A licence renewal here. A per-user fee that’s crept up since last year. A tool the IT team added eighteen months ago that nobody uses anymore but cancelling it requires a call to a sales team in a different time zone.

If you’re responsible for a school’s budget and technology decisions, this pattern is probably familiar. The total keeps growing, and it’s increasingly hard to explain exactly what you’re getting for it.

There’s a structural reason this happens — and it’s worth understanding before you sign the next renewal.

How SaaS pricing is designed to grow

Most school software today is sold as a subscription. That model works well for the vendor: predictable revenue, low churn, and pricing that scales with your organisation.

It works less well for you.

Per-user pricing means every new teacher, administrator, or student enrolled adds to the bill. Annual price increases are built into most contracts — often 5 to 10 percent, sometimes more. And once your staff have been trained on a platform and your data lives inside it, the practical cost of switching becomes very high.

That’s not an accident. It’s the model.

The sprawl problem

The issue is rarely one expensive tool. It’s ten moderately priced tools that nobody planned to run simultaneously.

A student information system. A learning management platform. A separate tool for communications. Another for scheduling. One for reporting. One the previous IT manager installed that everyone has forgotten about.

Each one made sense at the time it was purchased. Together, they create a situation where significant budget is leaving the school every month, spread across vendors in different countries, with data sitting in systems you don’t fully control.

The question worth asking

Before the next renewal, it’s worth asking a simple question about each tool you’re paying for:

Does this software work the way our school works, or have we adapted how we work to fit the software?

If the honest answer is the second one — and for most schools it is — that’s worth paying attention to. Off-the-shelf tools are built for the average school. They work adequately for most things and poorly for the specific things that matter most to you.

What the alternative looks like

Custom software built for your school’s specific workflows costs more upfront than a monthly SaaS subscription. That’s true and worth saying clearly.

But the comparison changes when you look at a three or five-year window.

A system built for you, running on infrastructure your school owns, has no per-user fees. No annual price increases. No vendor deciding to retire a feature you depend on, or changing their pricing model, or being acquired by a larger company with different priorities.

The school I think of most clearly in this context is a manufacturer I’ve worked with for several years — not a school, but the principle is identical. They had an e-commerce operation that was technically running but practically broken, dependent on a third-party platform they couldn’t modify and a hosting arrangement they didn’t control. We rebuilt it on infrastructure they own. Three years later, their costs are predictable, their data is theirs, and when something needs changing, they call one person.

That’s what owning your stack looks like in practice.

This isn’t right for every school

Custom software makes sense when your needs are specific enough that off-the-shelf tools consistently fall short, and when you have enough stability to invest in something built to last.

It doesn’t make sense as a reaction to one bad renewal conversation.

But if you’re looking at your software budget and finding it hard to justify what you’re spending — or if you’re increasingly aware that your student data is sitting in systems outside your control — it’s worth understanding what the alternative actually involves.

If you’re at that point and want to talk through what a vendor-free approach might look like for your school, I’m happy to have that conversation.

Connect on LinkedIn or reach out directly at hi@madalin.me.