What Should a 35-Staff Private School Actually Pay for Software?

Search "how much does private school software cost" and you'll find generic per-student estimates that ignore the one decision that actually drives the number: whether your school runs on FACTS or on Blackbaud. Pick FACTS SIS and FACTS Tuition Management syncs with it natively. Pick Blackbaud SIS and Smart Tuition is the tuition platform built alongside it. Cross the ecosystems — Blackbaud SIS with a FACTS-side tool, say — and things that should sync automatically don't, which shows up as staff time long before it shows up as a line item.

Here's what we actually see, pillar by pillar, when we run the numbers for a private school around 35 staff and 150 students — small enough that an enterprise-tier platform is overkill, large enough that a spreadsheet-and-good-intentions approach has already broken down.

Sales & Marketing: $355-655/mo

Ravenna ($250/mo) is the admissions engine — an inquiry-to-enrollment CRM built specifically for K-12 private schools — and it earns its price by replacing the spreadsheet-and-sticky-notes version of tracking which families toured, which applied, and which are still waiting on a financial-aid decision. The common failure mode isn't picking the wrong CRM; it's schools that keep tracking admissions in a shared spreadsheet past 30-40 inquiries a year and lose families simply because nobody followed up within 48 hours. Ravenna also only lists a native connection to FACTS SIS — schools running Blackbaud SIS get no automatic hand-off from an accepted application into the student record.

Mailchimp ($65/mo) and Calendly ($40/mo) are the cheap, easy-to-skip pieces — re-enrollment reminders and self-serve tour booking — and they're usually the first line items cut when a budget gets tight, which is a mistake, since together they cost less than one missed open house. Meta Ads ($300/mo) is the real variable: schools with a strong feeder pipeline (a parish, a company's employee base, a sibling waitlist) can often run near $355/mo without it, while schools competing for out-of-network families in a crowded suburb need the full $655/mo stack to keep the admissions funnel full.

Core Operations: $550-700/mo — the one decision that ripples through everything else

FACTS SIS ($350/mo) is the leaner of the two, priced for schools from 5 up to about 200 staff, and it's the hub of the FACTS ecosystem — it natively connects to Ravenna, DocuSign, and FACTS Tuition Management, so enrollment, e-signed contracts, and billing all reach the same student record without a manual step in between.

Blackbaud SIS ($500/mo) is the heavier platform, priced from 10 up to 400 staff — real headroom for a school planning to grow past 200 — but its integration list is shorter: it connects to Canvas LMS and Smart Tuition, and nothing else in this stack. A school running Blackbaud SIS alongside Ravenna or DocuSign is running two tools that don't talk to each other, which means someone in the front office is re-keying enrollment and contract data by hand.

Canvas LMS ($200/mo) sits on top of either SIS and handles the classroom side — assignments, gradebook sync, and the parent/student portal — and it's one of the few tools in this stack that genuinely works the same way regardless of which SIS you picked.

Finance: $669-689/mo — and a tier worth double-checking

The tuition platform choice mirrors the SIS choice: FACTS Tuition Management ($300/mo) syncs with FACTS SIS and includes financial-aid application and assessment processing built in; Smart Tuition ($280/mo) syncs with Blackbaud SIS and covers billing and payment plans but not financial-aid assessment. A school assessing need-based aid in-house on Smart Tuition is usually running that step through a spreadsheet or an outside consultant, because the platform itself doesn't do it.

QuickBooks Online Plus ($90/mo), Gusto ($200/mo), Bill.com ($99/mo), and Ramp ($0/mo, fee-free cards) round out the ledger, payroll, AP, and expense-capture layer, and they're genuinely close to fixed costs regardless of which SIS ecosystem you're on. The one thing worth flagging: QuickBooks Online Plus is priced in our data for organizations up to about 25 employees. A 35-staff school is already past that band, which is worth checking directly with your accountant — either you've been quietly bumped to a higher, unrenegotiated tier, or it's time to price out QuickBooks Advanced before your next contract renewal.

Admin & Security: $430/mo — the one pillar that doesn't change with your SIS choice

Google Workspace ($170/mo) is the productivity backbone for faculty and staff email, calendars, and shared drives. 1Password Business ($95/mo) exists because staff juggling logins for the SIS, the admissions portal, and the tuition platform will otherwise write them on a sticky note or reuse the same password across all three — a real risk when two of those systems hold family financial data. Huntress Managed EDR ($85/mo) puts managed, human-monitored threat detection on office and classroom machines that touch student records, which matters because student data is FERPA-protected regardless of school size, and "we run free antivirus" is not a defensible answer if a laptop with enrollment records goes missing. DocuSign ($80/mo) covers e-signature for enrollment contracts and financial-aid agreements — and, notably, it only lists a native FACTS SIS connection, not Blackbaud.

What this adds up to

Add it up and a genuinely optimized stack for a 35-staff private school lands around $2,004-2,474/mo. Schools this size commonly report paying $6,650-10,925/mo for overlapping coverage — and the gap rarely comes from needing more capability. It comes from running both SIS platforms through a slow migration, paying a tuition-platform fee that doesn't match your SIS, sitting on a QuickBooks tier priced for a smaller school, and running paid social spend that a strong referral pipeline doesn't need.

The fastest way to see where your specific stack lands against these numbers is to run the free audit — it uses your actual staff count and current spend, not a generic per-student estimate.