Buyer's guide
Questions to ask microschool management platform vendors to uncover hidden limitations, with Pearspark's own answers
A platform can look perfect in a demo and still leave you with manual work, data you cannot get out, or a bill that grows faster than enrollment. The trick is to ask about failure modes, not features. Here are the questions, and our answers to all of them, checked against our own code.
Written by the Pearspark team · updated · about 18 minutes
In short
To uncover a school platform's hidden limitations, ask what it cannot do and which features are roadmap rather than live; have the vendor enroll a part-time student in two mixed-age classes with different schedules and then move them mid-term; ask for the three-year total cost including processing, messaging and exit fees; run a data export yourself before signing; ask which integrations sync live and which only import; ask which settings an administrator can change without calling them; test the portal as a parent; ask for the audit log, the support response time, the subprocessor list, and what happens if the vendor shuts down.
Evaluate failure modes, not features
Every platform passes its own demo. What separates them is what happens at the edges: the student who is in two classes and not the rest, the parent in a second household, the invoice that needs a sibling discount and an aid award, the export the day you decide to leave. Feature lists do not show edges. The questions below do.
Three of them matter more than the rest. Ask what the platform cannot do, and get it in writing. Ask for a data export on sample data before you sign, and look at what comes out. And ask what you would actually pay over three years, including every processing, messaging and exit fee. A vendor's answers to those three predict the other eleven.
1. What can't your platform do?
The best question, because it takes the salesperson off the feature list. The answers should be specific and demonstrable.
| Ask | Pearspark's answer |
|---|---|
| What can't it do? | Take student work submissions (no uploads, no turn-in; it is not an LMS). Offer a public API or outbound webhooks. Publish a calendar feed. Sync to QuickBooks (accounting is a CSV export). Take attendance by period. Flag a student as part-time (fewer class enrollments is how you express it). Hide grades from parents. Let parents edit their own contact details. Track instructional hours. Keep a history of grade values or compare grading across teachers. |
| Which features are roadmap rather than live? | None on this site. Everything described on pearspark.com is live today. We do not publish a roadmap. |
| What needs a workaround, spreadsheet or third-party product? | A text newsletter, or any text a family can reply to — ours go one way, from the emergency console and the message composer only. Student work collection (many schools use Google Classroom beside Pearspark). A side-by-side comparison of two teachers' grade distributions. Instructional hours if your state wants them. Refund arithmetic, which happens in the school's own Stripe dashboard rather than here. |
| Why do schools choose not to use you? | We do not have enough lost deals to rank the reasons honestly. From the gap list, we would expect student submissions, an API, and schools that want texting bundled rather than bought by the text. |
| Can you show the limitations live? | Yes. The trial is the demo: thirty days, the full product, no sales call. Try each item above yourself. |
2. Enrollment and scheduling
Microschools rarely fit one student, one grade, one fixed schedule. Ask the vendor to build an unusual student in front of you, not to confirm that a feature exists.
| Ask | Pearspark's answer |
|---|---|
| Can a student enroll in only some classes? | Yes. Enrollment is per class; a student can be in one class or twenty. There is no part-time label. |
| Mixed-age or mixed-grade classes? | Yes. A class's grade level is optional free text and nothing checks a student's grade against it. |
| Individualized schedules? | A student's schedule is the sum of their classes. There is no per-student timetable. |
| Irregular or once-a-week classes? | Yes. Any weekly pattern, an A/B rotation, and per-date exceptions for a cancelled or moved meeting. |
| Mid-term class change without corrupting records? | Attendance and grades in the old class survive, and the transcript still shows the term grade. Gap: the report card for that term lists only classes the student is currently in, so a class they left mid-term drops off it. Print the transcript for the history. |
| Part-time students, siblings on different arrangements, rolling admissions? | Yes. Tuition is assigned per student with its own amount, discount, start and end date, and prorates by day. |
| Does attendance know which days a class meets? | Yes. A class follows its timetable where it has one, and otherwise its own meeting days (a hybrid's upper school on Tuesday and Thursday), falling back to the school's answer to "which days do you meet". Open a day the class does not meet and the sheet says so and still lets you record it, and the classes-not-taken report counts only days the class actually met, so a home day is never flagged as a missed sheet. A class with no timetable, no meeting days of its own and none set for the school is still expected every day. |
3. What you pay the vendor: the real price
Do not ask what it costs. Ask what you would pay over three years, including every mandatory and optional charge.
| Ask | Pearspark's answer |
|---|---|
| Priced per what? | Per student, one plan. $50 a month covers the first 20 students, then $2.50 a student to 100, $2.00 to 300, $1.50 to 600, and $1.00 beyond. A school of 50 pays $125 a month, $350 at 150. |
| Minimum student count? | None. The floor is $50 a month. |
| Per enrolled student, per active student, per family, or per seat? | Per active student. A student who withdraws or graduates stops counting from the month their status changes, and their record stays where it is. Staff accounts, parent accounts, extra campuses and the parent app are free and unlimited, so the bill is the active roster and nothing else. |
| What happens to the price as enrollment moves? | It follows the active count, up or down, and the rate per student falls as the school grows. Worth knowing how, because it is not a meter: we reconcile a school's subscription against its active roster rather than re-rating it the moment a student is added, and a change lands on the next invoice instead of prorating mid-cycle — so a week of enrolling never produces a surprise charge that week. If your enrollment has dropped, say so and we will re-sync it rather than let it wait. |
| Are enrollment, billing, attendance, grading, messaging and reporting separate modules? | No. Nothing is a module with its own price. Seventeen parts of the product are switches a school owns, and four of them (rubrics, clubs, the community feed and the time clock) ship off until someone turns them on. |
| Payment processing fees? ACH versus card? | Online tuition costs Stripe's own rate for the method (bank debit is far cheaper than cards) plus 0.5% to Pearspark, deducted from the school's payout. Families are never surcharged. Cash and check cost nothing. |
| Are texts, emails or notifications metered? | Email and push are unlimited. Text messages are the exception, and they are the only thing here charged by use: prepaid credits from 2.7¢ a text, in packs, with no monthly fee and no expiry. Nothing else on the bill moves with how much you use it. |
| Implementation, migration, training, support? | None. Setup is self-serve, imports are included, support is free email answered by a person. |
| Renewal increases? Fees for leaving or exporting? | Month to month, so there is no renewal. Price changes need thirty days' written notice and take effect at the next billing period. No exit or export fee. One post-cancellation charge exists: $15 per family records packet after the account has closed. |
4. Collecting tuition from families
The section above is what you pay the vendor. This is the machinery you will use every month, and "yes, we do billing" hides more than any other answer in a demo. Ask each of these about one real family, not in general.
| Ask | Pearspark's answer |
|---|---|
| Whose payment processor, and whose account does the money land in? | Stripe, in the school's own connected Stripe account. Tuition never passes through a Pearspark balance and we never hold your money. Gap: you cannot bring a different processor. Cash, checks and anything else are recorded by hand and count the same everywhere in the ledger. |
| Who pays the processing fee? Is bank debit cheaper than a card? | The school, out of its own payout: Stripe's rate for the method plus 0.5% to Pearspark. Bank debit is far cheaper than a card. Families are never surcharged, and cash and checks cost nothing. |
| Which payment schedules are supported? | Weekly, every two weeks, monthly, quarterly, half-yearly, annual and one-off, plus plans that follow the school's own calendar: one payment per term, one per month the year spans, or one for the year. Amounts prorate when a student starts or leaves mid-period, and one plan can carry a different amount for a particular student, so four negotiated tuitions do not need four plans. |
| Sibling discounts, staff discounts, scholarships, sliding scale? | Each is an award on the student — a flat amount or a percentage, with its own start and end date — reported and reconciled separately from tuition rather than buried in the invoice total. Money from an ESA, a voucher or a scholarship-granting organization is deliberately the other kind: it never quietly reduces the family's bill, it shows as expected from that funder and is matched to the payment when it arrives. |
| Deposits and enrollment fees? | A deposit is money the school is holding, drawn down against the family's next invoices oldest first, and every draw-down is a payment line — so "where did the $500 go" is answerable from the payment history alone. |
| Can a family pay part of a bill? | Yes, where the school allows it. The online floor is $5, and a payment that would leave less than $5 behind is refused rather than stranding a remainder too small to pay. |
| What happens when a payment fails? | The family is emailed the same sentence their portal banner shows, so the screen and the email never give two accounts of one decline. Autopay is held rather than retried blindly — a bank that returns one debit usually returns the next, and each return can cost the family a fee — and the failure appears on the school's tuition dashboard. A bank debit that bounces days later is handled the same way as a card declined on the spot. |
| Late fees, automatically? | Yes: a flat amount or a percentage of the unpaid balance, after a grace period you set, applied once per invoice by the nightly sweep and waivable by hand. Never retroactive — switching it on leaves bills that were already due alone — and never charged on money a state program is paying, because programs do not reimburse late fees. |
| Refunds, credits and mistakes? | Gap: refunds are issued by the school in its own Stripe dashboard and Pearspark mirrors the result; there is no refund button here. A payment recorded by hand in error is voided in the app with who, when and why, and stays visible rather than disappearing. An invoice that ends up overpaid is flagged to the office, and the family is not told automatically. |
| Does it reach our accounting? | As a journal export in CSV shaped for QuickBooks, carrying Stripe payout references, with a per-payment override when one payment belongs in a different account. Gap: nothing syncs live to QuickBooks or Xero. |
| Which billing scenario would we still handle outside the platform? | The arithmetic of a refund across a family with three children and a mid-year withdrawal. It ends up as a decision someone makes in Stripe and a note in the ledger. |
5. Data portability: ask before signing
The limitation buyers most often discover too late. Do not accept "yes, we can export your data." Ask the vendor to run an export on sample data and show you the files.
| Ask | Pearspark's answer |
|---|---|
| Can I export everything myself, any time? | Most of it, by button, any time including the trial: the roster, every class gradebook, library, applicants, timesheets, volunteer hours, the accounting journal, aid, fee batches, and every report (attendance history is a report). All CSV. Report cards, transcripts and records packets print to PDF. |
| What is not self-serve? | Gap: the export-everything dump (every table, as JSON, messages included) is run by Pearspark on request rather than by a button. There is no message export and no attendance-only button; attendance is inside the attendance report. |
| Are attachments included? | Gap: no. Uploaded documents (health, custody, aid, admission) stay encrypted in storage and come out one at a time from their records. |
| Can I test an export before signing? | Yes. Every CSV button works during the trial. |
| What happens to our data on termination? How long is it kept? | Nothing is deleted until you ask. Then we return the data, delete it, and ask our subprocessors to delete it; copies in routine backups age out on the normal cycle. There is no automatic purge timer; a cancelled school's data sits untouched until you ask. |
| Contract language on ownership and deletion? | The privacy policy is public and says the school owns its data. A data-processing addendum is available by email on request. |
6. Integrations and APIs
The revealing question is not which logos appear on the integrations page. It is which ones sync live, which only import a file, and who maintains each.
| Ask | Pearspark's answer |
|---|---|
| Which integrations are genuinely supported today? | Stripe (subscription billing, and Stripe Connect so tuition lands in the school's own account). Clerk for sign-in, Resend for email, Vercel for hosting and file storage. Website embeds for the application and interest forms. Google Books for ISBN lookup in the library. |
| Which are import-only? | Roster imports from thirteen vendor exports plus Clever and OneRoster CSV files, and spreadsheets. Import only; nothing syncs live. |
| Is there an API? Documented? Rate limits? Extra cost? | Gap: no public API, no API keys, no outbound webhooks, no Zapier. All integrations are maintained by us. |
| What happens when an integration fails, and who notices? | Nothing here syncs on a schedule, so there is no nightly sync to fail quietly; the moving part is Stripe telling us a payment happened. If Stripe cannot reach us during a deploy or an outage, the money is already in the school's Stripe account and the invoice catches up when the message arrives. Our own signup checkouts have an hourly sweep that repairs a lost message; tuition payments do not have one. Gap: no error log a school can read for itself and no status page — what you see is the state of the invoice, not the state of the plumbing. |
| Accounting, calendar, LMS, email, website without duplicate entry? | Accounting: CSV exports shaped for QuickBooks import, with Stripe payout references. Calendar: no feed. LMS: none; Google Classroom beside Pearspark is the common pairing. Email: built in. Website: the embeds. |
| Show data moving from enrollment to record to billing to attendance to reporting without retyping. | This is the one thing to watch in the trial. Accept an applicant and the student record, family portal access and tuition assignment appear from the application; attendance and reports read from the same record. |
7. "Configurable" or just "customizable"?
"Yes, that's configurable" can mean three different things: you can change it, we change it for you and bill you, or it goes on a list. Ask which one, every time, and ask what it costs and whether it can be undone.
| Ask | Pearspark's answer |
|---|---|
| Who makes the change — you, or us? | You, in Settings. There are no professional services to buy, no configuration tickets and no consultant network, because there is nobody here to sell you those hours. |
| What can an administrator change without contacting you? | Which of the seventeen modules the school uses; the school's own vocabulary (what a grade level is called, what an at-home day is called, the headings on the report card's work-habits and plan-goals sections, the names of lesson-plan sections, the label on a late fee); grading scales school-wide with per-class and per-subject overrides; how a standards report card prints; letterhead and printed documents; roles built from about seventy permissions, with per-person extras and denials; the questions on the application; forms with their own fields, prices and typed-name signatures; and the logo and two brand colors. |
| What can't be customized at all, however nicely we ask? | Four things worth knowing before you sign. You cannot add your own field to a student record — school-defined questions live on the application and on forms, and their answers stay with the student. There is no report builder: you get saved lists over students and guardians with your own columns, filters and grouping, and beyond that a fixed catalog. You cannot edit the wording of the emails Pearspark sends your families. And there is no white-labeling; your logo and colors ride on our product, not the other way round. |
| Does a change cost anything, or wait for a release? | No and no, for everything two rows up. Three things do need us: a negotiated price, the export-everything dump, and deleting a closed school's data. |
| Can we undo it ourselves? | Turning a module off hides it and never deletes what is inside it. Renaming anything is display-only and never rewrites records that already exist, so a school that renames "Grade" to "Level" has not edited a single student. Every importer previews before it writes and can be undone for 24 hours. |
| Ask everyone: what are the five things customers most often ask you to customize that you can't? | Ours are above — a field of your own on a student record, a report builder, our email wording, white-labeling — plus a text message a family can reply to, because ours go one way. A vendor who cannot name five is either very new or not listening. |
8. Parent and family experience
Have the vendor show this from the parent's side, not the administrator's. In Pearspark, staff can preview any family's portal view, and the trial lets you sign in as a parent yourself.
| Ask | Pearspark's answer |
|---|---|
| Does every parent need an account? | No. A guardian can exist on a record without a login. They need one to use the portal. Parent accounts are free and unlimited. |
| One parent, several children? | Yes. One login, every child. |
| Separated households? | Each guardian signs in separately and can have their own invoice and autopay. A custody restriction shows as a warning to staff, not a lock on the other parent's access. |
| Can we control what each parent sees? | Lesson-plan visibility per class (hidden, topics, full plans, home days only). Gap: grades cannot be hidden from parents. |
| Can parents update their own information? | Gap: not their name, phone or email. Health changes go in as requests for staff to apply. Notification preferences are theirs. |
| Attendance, grades, invoices, forms and messages in one place? | Yes, plus calendar, school documents, health records, the week's lessons and library books out. |
| A parent without a smartphone? | The portal is a website. The app install is optional. Email notifications and a weekly digest cover it. |
| Can families message teachers without exposing private numbers? | Yes. Parents write to staff by name inside the portal; no personal phone is shown. |
9. Staff permissions and privacy
Important when four people hold nine jobs. Ask for the audit log specifically, and ask what it records.
| Ask | Pearspark's answer |
|---|---|
| Can one person hold several roles? | One role per person per school, built from a catalog of about seventy permissions, with per-person extras and denials. A staff member who is also a parent gets a family hat and switches between the two views. |
| Can we keep financial data from teachers? | Yes. Teachers hold no tuition or aid permissions by default. |
| Can teachers see only their own students? | Gap: teachers see the whole roster by default. Restrict a teacher to a caseload (assigned students or grade levels) if you want less. |
| Can administrators see everything? Are permissions ours to change? | Yes and yes, without us. |
| Is there an audit log? | Yes. Every change, with who, when, IP address and browser, plus views of sensitive records: health, custody, aid and admission documents, message oversight, and any records released. Ordinary page views are not logged. |
| Multi-factor sign-in? | Gap: not enforced by Pearspark today. |
10. Records, transcripts and reporting
"Student records" does not always mean transcripts. Ask for each document by name.
| Ask | Pearspark's answer |
|---|---|
| Official transcripts? | Yes, with GPA weighted and unweighted, credits, and transfer credit named to the school that issued it. |
| Our own grading scales? | Yes. A school-wide scale with per-class and per-subject overrides. |
| Narrative evaluations instead of grades? | Yes. One narrative per student per term, and standards or checklist report cards with no letter grades at all. |
| Credits or hours? | Credits yes. Gap: instructional hours, no. |
| Report cards? | Traditional, standards-based, and checklist, with work habits. |
| Custom reports without paying you? | Saved lists over students and guardians with your own columns, filters and grouping. Everything else is a fixed catalog of reports. Any report can email itself weekly or monthly. Nothing costs extra and no report requires support to run. |
| Records for students who leave? If the school closes? | Withdrawn and graduated students stay on the record. If the school closes, a snapshot of each student's transcript and attendance summary is held outside the school's account and stays obtainable by the family; free while you are a customer, $15 a packet after closure. |
| A format another school can use? | The records packet PDF: cover, immunizations, attendance by year, transcript. |
11. Implementation: the labor you are buying
Ask who does the work and how many of your own hours to budget. Then ask the test question at the end.
| Ask | Pearspark's answer |
|---|---|
| Who performs the implementation? | You, from a guided setup, in about twenty minutes. No consultants exist to require. |
| How many staff hours? | Two or three for a school of forty, most of it cleaning the roster spreadsheet. |
| What migration is included? Who cleans duplicates? | Self-serve importers with a preview and a 24-hour undo for roster, grades, transcripts, health, aid and applicants. The preview reports duplicate adults and ambiguous dates; you fix the file. We help by email if the file is awkward. |
| How long until operational? | A morning for a school of forty. Longer if you are moving years of transcripts. |
| Can we configure it ourselves afterwards? Training for future staff? | Always. New staff get role quick-start handbooks, about 260 short how-to videos with the steps written out, and the in-app help finder. |
| If the person who set it up leaves tomorrow, can another administrator maintain it without calling you? | Yes. Nothing is configured anywhere but Settings, and the videos and handbooks are written for that person. |
12. Support and outages
Do not accept "excellent support." Ask for the response time, the hours, the SLA, and the uptime history. Here is where our answers are thinnest.
| Ask | Pearspark's answer |
|---|---|
| Response time? Phone? SLA? After hours? | Gap: email only, answered by a person, with no promised response time, no phone, no SLA and no after-hours coverage. The terms say we do not promise uninterrupted service. |
| Status page? Uptime history? Incident notification? | Gap: none published. We run on Vercel and Neon, whose status pages are public. |
| Disaster recovery? | Regular backups with restore. Gap: no published recovery-time objectives. |
13. Security and student data
Ask for evidence, not assurances. "FERPA compliant" on its own is not an answer.
| Ask | Pearspark's answer |
|---|---|
| Where is our data hosted? | The United States: Vercel (US East) and Neon. |
| Encrypted in transit and at rest? | Yes. Every uploaded document (health, custody, aid, admission, volunteer, teacher and policy files) is also encrypted by Pearspark before storage, and uploads refuse to run without the key. |
| Who can access it internally? Is access logged? | Read-only view of a school by our staff is logged to your activity log and expires after an hour. Write access needs a grant you create; it logs every write, blocks deletes and billing fields, and emails your admins a summary afterwards. |
| Subprocessors? | Neon (database), Vercel (hosting, file storage), Clerk (sign-in), Stripe (payments; billing contact only, never student records), Resend (email), Twilio (text delivery; a guardian's phone number and the message text, never student records). Push notifications pass through Apple, Google and Mozilla. |
| Breach notification? | Without undue delay, per the privacy policy. |
| Do you use our data to train AI? Can we opt out? | No, and there is nothing to opt out of. The service has no AI features and no model provider. The in-app help finder is a text index with no model. School data never prompts a model. |
| Independent audits or certifications? | Gap: no SOC 2 or third-party audit. A written summary of security measures is available on request. |
| Data in backups after deletion? | Ages out on the backup cycle. |
14. The vendor's future
Often skipped. Ask about customers your size, what has been discontinued, and what happens if the company goes away.
| Ask | Pearspark's answer |
|---|---|
| How many schools our size? May we speak to two who have used you a year? | We do not publish a customer count. Email us and we will say in writing and put you in touch with schools your size. Ask every vendor for the length of those relationships as well as the names: ours are measured in months rather than years, because the product is new, and a reference from a 900-student academy tells a 30-student school very little either way. |
| What happens when we grow from 30 to 150? | The per-student rate falls and nothing in the product changes. Multiple campuses are built in. |
| What has been discontinued? What is being deprecated? | Paid setup and support tiers, and the public demo, both in August 2026. No feature a school used has been removed. Nothing is being deprecated. |
| Committed versus aspirational roadmap? | We publish neither. What is on the site is live. |
| How much depends on third parties? | Hosting, database, sign-in, payments, email and text delivery: the six subprocessors above. |
| What if you are acquired or shut down? | Gap: the terms say nothing about it. The records snapshot protects families if a school closes, not if Pearspark does. Your protection today is the export you can run any time and the full dump on request. |
The five-scenario demo, and how Pearspark does on it
Give every finalist the same five scenarios and make them perform each one live. We have no sales demo, so run them yourself in the trial.
- New student: apply on the embedded form, accept, watch the student record, portal access and tuition assignment appear, assign classes, take attendance. Pearspark: yes.
- Weird schedule: one student in two mixed-age classes with different meeting patterns. Pearspark: yes.
- Mid-year change: move that student to another class and look at the history. Pearspark: attendance and grades kept, transcript intact, and the gap named above: that term's report card omits the class they left.
- Parent: sign in as the parent and find the schedule, attendance, grades, forms, messages and balance. Pearspark: yes, and staff can preview any family's portal view.
- Exit: export that student's complete record. Pearspark: transcript and records packet as PDF, gradebook and roster as CSV, every report as CSV. The full dump is run on request.
The parts of Pearspark these questions touch
Each page states what the feature does today, on the same rule of naming what it does not.
Three of the scenarios, done
Importing a roster, connecting Stripe, and paying an invoice as a parent. A minute each.
Common questions
What questions should I ask microschool management platform vendors to uncover hidden limitations?
Ask what the platform cannot do and which features are roadmap rather than live; have them enroll a part-time student in two mixed-age classes with different schedules and move them mid-term; ask for the three-year total cost with processing, messaging and exit fees; run a data export yourself before signing; ask which integrations sync live and which only import; ask which settings an administrator can change without calling them; test the portal as a parent; and ask for the audit log, the support response time, the subprocessor list, and what happens if the vendor shuts down.
What are the most common hidden limitations in school management software?
Attendance that only works by day or only by period; a report card or transcript that loses history when a student changes classes; sibling discounts and split households handled by hand; text messages, payment processing or parent accounts billed separately; exports that omit attachments, messages or history; integrations that import a file once but never sync; and support with no stated response time.
How do I verify a vendor's data export claim?
Ask them to run the export on sample data in front of you, or run it yourself in a trial, and open the files. Check for historical attendance and grades, transcripts, invoices and payments, notes, documents and messages, and ask what format each arrives in. In Pearspark every roster, gradebook and report exports as CSV during the trial; the complete dump is run on request, and attachments are not included.
What is the real cost of school software over three years?
The subscription at your enrollment for 36 months, plus payment-processing fees on the tuition you collect online, plus any per-message, per-parent, per-module, setup, training, support or exit fee. Ask for every one in writing. Pearspark at 50 students is $125 a month with no other charges except Stripe's processing rate plus 0.5% on online tuition, and a $15 records packet after an account closes.
What should I ask about student data security?
Where the data is hosted, whether it is encrypted in transit and at rest, who at the vendor can access it and whether that access is logged, the list of subprocessors, the breach-notification commitment, whether student data is used to train AI models, whether there are independent audits, and how deletion reaches backups. Pearspark's answers are in the table above, including the gap: no third-party audit.
What should I ask a school software vendor about customization?
Ask who makes each change — you, or the vendor for a fee — how long it takes, whether you can undo it, and which settings an administrator can reach without opening a ticket. Then ask the question that produces an honest list: what are the five things customers most often ask you to customize that your product cannot? Everything configurable in Pearspark is in Settings and free; the five it cannot do are a field of your own on a student record, a report builder, the wording of the emails we send families, white-labeling, and a text message a family can reply to.
What should I ask a vendor about collecting tuition from families?
Whose payment processor it uses and whose bank account the tuition lands in, who pays the processing fee and whether bank debit costs less than a card, which payment schedules exist, how sibling discounts, scholarships and ESA money are represented, whether a family can pay part of a bill, what happens when a payment fails, whether late fees are automatic, who can issue a refund, and how any of it reaches your accounting. Pearspark collects into the school's own Stripe account at Stripe's rate plus 0.5%, applies late fees automatically, and cannot issue a refund — the school does that in Stripe and we mirror the result.
What should I ask about the vendor's own future?
How many customers are your size, what has been discontinued in the last two years, what is being deprecated now, how much of the product depends on third-party services, and what happens to your data if the company is acquired or shuts down. Pearspark publishes no customer count, has removed no feature a school used, and has no shutdown clause in its terms; the export you can run any time is the protection today.
Sources
Every figure on this page is read from the source linked below. Where no source could be found for a claim, the claim is not made.
The full comparison behind each row
Each one is sourced feature by feature, last reviewed August 2026, and says plainly where the other system is the better choice.
See it before you decide
Every task is on video — one minute each — and your first 30 days are free. No sales call.