Why We Priced Inkrant the Way We Did — A Founder's Note on Tiers and Value

The Honest Math Behind Inkrant's Four Tiers

Most school management platforms in India don't publish their prices. You fill out a demo form, take a 30-minute sales call, and then learn what it costs. By the time you've evaluated three platforms, you've burned a week of your time before you can even compare options.

We chose to do the opposite. Inkrant publishes pricing for Mini, Lite, and Pro on the website. Enterprise stays quote-based because chains and large institutions genuinely have unique requirements — but for everyone else, the math is in the open.

This post is the longer version of why. It explains what each tier actually buys you, why we chose four bands instead of two or ten, and what we deliberately decided not to charge for.

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Why Four Tiers, Not One Big "Pro" Plan

A school with 80 students, two teachers, and one administrator is a fundamentally different operation from a 1,500-student institution with multiple branches and a dedicated IT team. Charging both the same is wrong in both directions: you either price the small school out of the market, or you give the large school the cost basis of a tuition centre.

We mapped the four tiers to four real customer types we kept seeing during early conversations:

1. Tuition centres and very small schools (sub-100 students) — Need digital records, attendance, fees, and parent communication. Don't need AI. Want one flat predictable bill.
2. Mainstream schools without an AI mandate — Need full ERP, multi-class scheduling, parent portals, and the ability to scale staff. AI is nice-to-have, not table-stakes.
3. Schools that want AI as a competitive edge — Are choosing software because of the AI. Want grading, timetable generation, at-risk detection, daily briefings. Will pay for it.
4. School chains and 1500+ student institutions — Need white-label, SLAs, custom integrations (Tally, biometric attendance, board portal sync), data residency, and on-site training.

Each tier exists because the gap between any two of these customer types is too large to fit in a single price.

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Inkrant Mini — ₹999/month flat

For tuition centres, coaching institutes, and very small schools (capped at 100 students). Includes attendance, fee management, gradebook, parent portal, and email + mobile app notifications. 10 staff seats included; ₹99 per extra seat up to 20.

What you actually get for ₹999: A fully working school ERP that replaces the spreadsheets, WhatsApp groups, and manual fee receipts most centres still run on. Push notifications to parents the moment a child is marked absent. UPI payment links for fee collection with automatic reminders. Single-page report cards generated from a click. The same auth, encryption, and infrastructure that runs the bigger tiers — Mini schools share none of the data with anyone else.

What you don't get: Any of the AI features. We made this deliberate. AI calls cost real money per use, and at ₹999/month flat, the unit economics don't work if a Mini school runs hundreds of grading queries. Mini is for schools that want a clean digital ERP without paying for AI they won't use.

When you cross 100 students, the system tells you to upgrade to Lite. The cap isn't artificial — it's where Mini stops being the right plan for you.

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Inkrant Lite — ₹2,999/month flat + ₹19 per student per month

For mainstream schools that want full ERP plus the single most-painful AI use case: AI Report Card Comments. Teachers in Indian schools spend roughly 5 minutes per student per term writing personalised remarks for report cards. A class of 35 students × five subjects-worth of context = three to four hours of mind-numbing work, every term, per class teacher. Multiply by the number of class teachers and the number of terms per year, and the cost in teacher hours is staggering.

Lite includes an AI feature that generates personalised, score-aware comments for every student in seconds. The teacher reviews, edits a few, and signs off. Three-plus hours per class per term collapse to fifteen minutes. That's the Lite differentiator — and at this price point, no other platform in India offers it.

What else Lite gives you: Full ERP (everything Mini has, plus more). Multi-branch support up to 2 branches. 25 staff seats included; ₹99 per extra up to 50. 25 GB storage. 14-day free trial, no credit card needed.

Pricing math for a 200-student school: ₹2,999 + (200 × ₹19) = ₹6,799/month all-in. That's ~₹81,600/year. For a school that pays its admin staff ₹15-25K/month, the platform pays for itself in time saved on attendance, report cards, and fee collection alone.

What Lite doesn't include: AI grading of subjective answers, AI timetable generation, AI assessment creation, AI at-risk detection, AI daily briefings, AI promotion recommendations. Those are Pro features. Lite is for schools that want one clear AI win — the report card comments — without paying for the rest of the suite.

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Inkrant Pro — ₹5,999/month flat + ₹39 per student per month

For schools that want AI as their actual differentiator. The full AI suite:

• AI Grading — Reads student answer sheets (typed or handwritten), evaluates subjective answers, and gives written feedback explaining each score. Teachers can review and override. Saves 4-6 hours per teacher per week.
• AI Timetable Generator — Generates a conflict-free weekly timetable in under 30 seconds. Handles teacher availability, lab requirements, break periods, and consecutive-period rules. Replaces 3-4 days of manual scheduling at the start of every term.
• AI Assessment Creator — Teacher specifies a topic, grade level, and difficulty. AI generates a complete question paper aligned to CBSE/ICSE/State Board curricula. Editable before publishing.
• AI At-Risk Student Detection — Flags students whose attendance, grade trends, or behavioural signals suggest they're at risk of falling behind. Updates throughout the year.
• AI Daily Briefing — Every morning, principals see a summary card: today's absent staff, students with attendance concerns, pending fee collections, performance anomalies. Glanceable, actionable.
• AI Promotion Recommendations — At year-end, AI analyses each student's full year and recommends promote/review/retain. Final decision always rests with the teacher.
• AI Report Card Comments — Same as Lite, included.

Pro adds 50 staff seats (₹249 per extra up to 100), multi-branch up to 5 branches, priority support (4-hour SLA, phone + chat + email), 100 GB storage, and a 14-day free trial.

Pricing math for a 500-student school on Pro: ₹5,999 + (500 × ₹39) = ₹25,499/month. That's ~₹3.06L/year. Compare with hiring a single dedicated coordinator at ₹25-35K/month (₹3.6-4.2L/year) just to do what AI does for you. The school not only saves money — they get speed and consistency a human can't match.

The fair-use cap is documented: 200 grading runs per student per month, 100 brain queries per school per day. That's far more than any normal school will use, and exists only to prevent automated abuse.

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Inkrant Enterprise — Custom Quote, starting from ₹39/student + ₹15,000 base

For school chains, premium institutions, and 1500+ student schools. Quote-based because every chain has different needs:

• White-label branding (your school's name, logo, colours, email domain)
• 99.9% uptime SLA with credits for breaches
• Dedicated customer success manager
• Custom integrations — Tally accounting, biometric attendance, board portal sync, parent communication tools your chain already uses
• Multi-branch consolidation across unlimited branches
• Custom data residency (where your data physically sits)
• On-site training for staff and teachers
• Priority on the feature roadmap — your asks get queued ahead

The starting price is ₹15,000 platform base + ₹39/student. Volume rates typically negotiate down to ₹29-35/student for chains over 1000 students. Quote-gated because the conversation matters more than the sticker.

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Why Per-Student Billing Is Fair

Some Indian competitors use flat-fee pricing — pay ₹83K/year for the platform regardless of school size. This sounds simple but creates two problems:

1. A 50-student school and a 500-student school cost the vendor very different amounts to support (more storage, more API calls, more support tickets). Flat fees subsidise the large school at the small school's expense.
2. The vendor either keeps the flat price low (and starves itself of revenue from large schools) or sets it high enough to cover the worst-case (and prices small schools out).

Per-student billing scales the cost with the size of what you're getting. A 100-student school on Lite pays ~₹4,900/month all-in. A 500-student school pays ~₹12,499/month. The 500-student school gets 5× more value, pays ~2.5× more — proportional but not punitive. The vendor's costs scale similarly.

It's the model that lets us serve a 60-student rural school for under ₹2,000 and a 1,400-student urban chain for ₹60,000 without lying to either of them about the unit economics.

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What We Deliberately Don't Charge For

A few things we believe should be free at every paid tier, and aren't priced separately:

• Push notifications and email alerts. Every paid tier (Mini, Lite, Pro, Enterprise) includes them. Other platforms charge ₹300-2,000/month for basic notifications.
• Parent portal access. Every paid plan. No per-parent, no per-app-install fee.
• Mobile app for all four roles (admin, teacher, parent, student). Free across paid tiers.
• Unlimited classes, subjects, and assessments. No per-module fees. We don't charge "extra for fee management" the way some legacy vendors do.

We also deliberately don't claim things we haven't shipped. WhatsApp Business API and SMS support are on the roadmap — planned for Q3 2026, pending Meta verification and TRAI DLT registration. Until those clear, we don't list them as "Included Free" the way some competitors do despite their schools waiting years. We'd rather underclaim and overdeliver.

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The Founding 100 Program

The first 100 schools to register on Inkrant get an additional 30% off any tier for their first 24 months. This stacks with the 25% annual prepay discount, so a school that joins as a founding partner and pays annually gets roughly 47.5% off the headline price for two years.

This isn't a marketing gimmick. It's how we de-risk early adoption for schools willing to bet on a new platform — the schools who will give us feedback, talk to other principals, and shape the product. Once the 100th slot is claimed, the program closes permanently. After 24 months, founding schools transition to standard pricing — they keep their feature set, just at the regular rate.

If you're reading this in 2026, slots are still open. If you're reading this in 2028, they almost certainly aren't.

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A Note on Trust

The reason we publish pricing on the website is the same reason we publish a comparison page that names competitors and tells you when they're a better fit than us. (For purely flat-budget institutes, Fedena's $999/year might genuinely be the right call. For schools running heavy live classes, Teachmint's classroom hardware integrates better than ours. We say so.)

Schools by Inkrant is built by a small team that's signing its first 100 schools right now. We can't out-spend the incumbents on sales theatre. What we can do is make every interaction — pricing page, comparison page, demo, contract — short, honest, and self-serve enough that a principal can evaluate us at 9pm without booking a meeting.

If you'd like to see the AI features running on your real (or demo) school data, every paid tier with AI comes with a 14-day free trial — no credit card. If it doesn't work for your school, you walk away with no friction.

See pricing → · Compare Inkrant with Teachmint, Fedena, and others → · Start a free trial →