Enrollment and tuition for microschools

The idea

Microschools are multiplying fast, pushed by ESA voucher money in Arizona, Florida, and Texas, and nearly every one is founded by a teacher, not an administrator. The result is a 250k USD-a-year school run on Venmo requests, a Google Form, and a DocuSign trial: tuition arrives late or not at all, sibling discounts are mental arithmetic, and the enrolment agreement, the document that protects the school when a family walks mid-year, is a Word file emailed around.

FACTS and Blackbaud own established private schools, with enterprise pricing, sales cycles, and setup projects a 15-student school cannot survive. The wedge is same-day self-serve: application form live in an hour, e-signed agreements with merge fields, and Stripe autopay with automatic sibling discounts. The ESA angle sharpens it, because voucher reimbursement runs on exactly the receipts and statements these founders currently cannot produce.

Who pays

The founder pays 99 USD/month flat from school fees, trivial against 6 to 12k USD tuitions and the failed-payment leakage it stops; flat pricing with unlimited students reads as honest to a buyer wary of per-student platform fees. Distribution: the microschool movement is unusually networked, through the National Microschooling Center, KaiPod and Prenda communities, and founder Facebook groups, and ESA-state momentum means new schools form weekly with this exact gap on day one.

MVP scope

• Self-serve application form builder with a public link and review queue
• Enrolment agreements from templates with typed e-signature capture
• Stripe tuition plans: pay in full or monthly installments with automatic sibling discounts
• Failed-payment handling with retries, flags, and reminder templates
• Parent portal with documents, receipts, and printable annual tuition statements
• Skip for v1: attendance, gradebooks, communication/messaging, financial aid workflows, state compliance reporting

Build PodDesk, a web app that runs enrolment and tuition for microschools of 5 to 50 students. Stack: Next.js (App Router), Supabase (Postgres, Auth, RLS), Stripe for tuition billing. Magic-link auth for founders and parents. Design constraint: a non-technical teacher-founder must go from signup to a live application form in under an hour, fully self-serve, no onboarding call.

Data model: School (name, logo, school year), Programmes (e.g. full-time 8,500 USD/yr, 3-day 5,400 USD/yr), Applications, Students, Families (a family links multiple students, which drives sibling discounts), EnrolmentAgreements, TuitionPlans, Payments.

Enrolment flow: founder builds an application form from templated fields plus custom questions, shares the link. Applications land in a queue with accept/waitlist/decline. Accepting generates an enrolment agreement from a founder-edited template with merge fields (student name, programme, tuition, start date); the parent signs by typing their name after scrolling the document (store the rendered text, typed signature, timestamp, and IP), then immediately sets up payment.

Tuition: pay in full, or 10 or 12 monthly installments via Stripe subscription schedules. Sibling discounts apply automatically from the family record (e.g. 10% off the second child, configurable). Late/failed payments: Stripe smart retries, then founder-visible flags with a templated reminder email. An ESA-friendly touch: per-payment receipts and a printable annual tuition statement per student, since voucher programmes demand documentation.

Pages: founder dashboard (roster, application queue, tuition status), form builder, agreement template editor, family/student profiles, parent portal (documents, payment method, receipts), settings.

Pricing: 99 USD/month flat, unlimited students. 30-day trial.