Pricing & commercials
MySentinel is priced per active learner, per month — a guide price of ~R10 per learner / month, negotiable at group volume. You pay for learners who actually use the system, not for software seats, not per campus, and not per scan. There are no setup tiers and no per-feature upsells: every school on the platform gets the same full product.
This page explains exactly how that number is reached, what it includes, where messaging costs sit, and how billing works today (manually, out of the app) versus what is on the roadmap.
What you pay for: billable learners
A billable learner is a learner who is genuinely active at one of your campuses in the billing month. We count on a gaming-resistant, max-daily-active basis, which means:
- We take the number of distinct learners who checked in or out on each school day in the month.
- Your billable count for a campus is the single busiest day in that month (the peak of daily-active learners), not the enrolment roster and not the sum of every learner who ever existed.
Why this basis, and why it is fair in both directions:
| Concern | How max-daily-active handles it |
|---|---|
| ”We’re being charged for learners who left months ago.” | You are not — a stale roster entry that never taps a badge is never billable. Only learners who actually check in/out count. |
| ”A school could under-report by trimming the roster.” | It cannot — a learner is counted the moment they tap at the gate, regardless of roster hygiene. Active means active. |
| ”Averaging could be gamed by spreading attendance across days.” | We use the peak single day, not an average, so quiet days never deflate the count and there is nothing to spread. |
| ”What about a one-off event day?” | The peak is a real school day of your normal operation; we discuss any genuine anomaly with you rather than letting a single outlier set the price. |
The data behind this is already metered in-product. Every campus dashboard carries a go-live checklist that tracks the roster and “X of Y learners checked in”, and channel usage metering is exposed in school settings — so the billable figure is auditable from the same numbers you see in the app.
What’s included in the per-learner price
Everything that makes MySentinel a safety system is in the base price — there is no “premium tier”:
- The full officer gate flow — NFC badge scan, check in / check out, guardian-optional release, immutable confirmed records.
- The full admin workspace — answer-first dashboard, learners, classes, attendance, absences, emergency, safety mode, day-close, settings, staff, reports.
- Class-teacher workspaces — class roster, daily roll, report digest, live pickup approvals (scoped to assigned classes).
- The tokenised parent portal — real-time learner status for guardians, no login required.
- Real-time everywhere — the live dashboard and parent portal update over the platform’s streaming layer.
- Trilingual UI — English, Afrikaans and isiZulu, idiomatic across the product.
- Per-school branding — your display name, logo, primary colour (#1f6650 by default) and accent (#c8923a), set in Settings.
- Security and compliance — JWT-scoped tenant isolation, passkey step-up on sensitive actions, encryption at rest for photos and guardian/visitor contacts, POPIA subject-access and erasure workflows, and an append-only audit trail.
- App push and email notifications to guardians — included channels (see below).
- Onboarding a new campus through the operator console’s durable provisioning workflow — no professional-services fee to add a school.
Channel economics (messaging)
Notifications go to guardians push-first, falling back down a chain: web push → email → WhatsApp → SMS. The economics differ by channel:
| Channel | Status | Who pays the channel cost |
|---|---|---|
| App / web push | Included | No per-message cost. Needs VAPID secrets provisioned per environment (Roadmap to provision on UAT/prod + real-device proof). |
| Included | No per-message cost to you for the platform’s branded email. | |
| Preview until connected | Bring-your-own provider (you connect your own Meta/WhatsApp Business provider and pay them directly) or marked-up pass-through (we bill the provider cost plus a small handling margin). | |
| SMS | Preview — operator-provisioned | Same as WhatsApp: BYO provider or marked-up pass-through. |
Channel honesty is built in. Until WhatsApp or SMS is actually connected for a school, the product shows a Preview badge and silently demotes to email rather than pretending a message was sent. You see this on the admin go-live checklist (“WhatsApp not connected yet [Preview]”) and on the operator console’s messaging-setup card, which states plainly that app notifications and email are the live channels while WhatsApp and SMS are in preview.
So the honest cold-start position is: app push and email are the live, included channels; WhatsApp and SMS are real capabilities that require per-school provider activation before they deliver, and their per-message costs are yours (BYO) or passed through with a margin.
How billing works today
Billing is currently manual and out-of-app. MySentinel meters the numbers you are billed on — peak daily-active learners per campus and channel usage — and surfaces them in the product, but the invoice itself is produced and reconciled outside the application by the MySentinel team against those figures. There is no card-on-file, no in-app subscription management, and no automated dunning.
- In-app billing / self-serve subscriptions: Roadmap. Not built. Do not assume a billing portal exists.
- Consolidated cross-campus billing report: today the platform aggregates channel-usage and billing figures across campuses; a fuller consolidated cross-campus academic report is Roadmap.
This is a deliberate, transparent arrangement for the current pilot stage: you get a clear monthly statement tied to auditable in-product numbers, and pricing stays negotiable per group rather than locked to a rigid self-serve tier.
Worked example — a 3-campus group
Take a group running three primary schools. Enrolment is the roster size; the billable figure is each campus’s busiest single day of actual check-ins in the month:
| Campus | Enrolled (roster) | Peak daily-active (billable) |
|---|---|---|
| Campus A | 640 | 612 |
| Campus B | 500 | 470 |
| Campus C | 360 | 338 |
| Group total | 1,500 | 1,420 |
Platform fee at the ~R10/learner/month guide price:
- 1,420 billable learners × R10 = R14,200 / month (~R170,400 / year), before any negotiated group discount — and at 1,400+ learners there is real room to negotiate the per-learner rate down.
- Note the group pays on 1,420, not the 1,500-strong roster: 80 enrolled-but-inactive learners (left, long-term absent, duplicate entries) are not billed.
Channels on top, illustratively:
- App push + email for all guardian notifications: included (R0 per message).
- If the group connects WhatsApp for, say, emergency and pickup alerts, those messages are billed at the group’s own provider rate (BYO) or provider cost + margin (pass-through). These are usage-driven and depend entirely on the provider you choose and volumes you send — they are not part of the per-learner fee, and nothing is charged for a channel that is still in Preview.
So this group’s predictable, committed cost is the ~R14,200/month platform fee (negotiable), with messaging beyond push/email as a separate, transparent, usage-based line.
Group-scoping note: today a chain owner does not log in to a single owner view scoped to just their campuses — cross-campus operations run through the platform operator role, and group-scoped owner tenancy is Roadmap. It does not change the pricing basis (still per active learner across your campuses), only the console you would use to see the group rolled up.
Summary
- Price: ~R10 per active learner / month, negotiable at group volume. No per-campus or per-feature fees.
- Counted on: peak daily-active learners per campus per month — fair and gaming-resistant in both directions, and auditable from in-product metering.
- Included: the entire product, plus app push and email notifications.
- Extra, usage-based: WhatsApp / SMS — BYO provider or marked-up pass-through, Preview until connected.
- Billing today: manual, out-of-app, against in-product numbers. In-app billing is Roadmap.