We charge an annual fixed fee that depends on your school roll. Prices are in New Zealand dollars including GST.
Under 500 students | $199 |
500 - 999 students | $299 |
1,000 - 1,499 students | $399 |
1,500 - 1,999 students | $499 |
2,000 - 2,499 students | $599 |
2,500 - 2,999 students | $699 |
3,000 - 3,499 students | $799 |
3,500 - 3,999 students | $899 |
Over 4,000 students | $999 |
Apart from telco costs (see below), there are no other charges. You can send as many alerts and have as many administrators as you like, at no extra cost.
NORMAL alerts are always free, but URGENT alerts may use SMS and voice services if your recipients have chosen to be contacted those ways. Because the telcos charge us to deliver SMS and voice, we have to pass these charges on.
However, unlike many messaging services, we pass telco charges on at cost. Because we don't make a profit on them, we have no vested interest in forcing you to use them. Indeed, we offer several free alternatives (like Facebook Messenger), and by encouraging your community to switch their URGENT preferences to one of these free alternatives, you can minimise telco charges.
We update telco pricing from our suppliers every 24 hours. Current prices for Australia delivery are:
SMS delivery: | 0.87 | cents per message |
Landline voice: | 1.32 | cents per minute |
Mobile voice: | 1.32 | cents per minute |
Yes! Just sign up for a free trial, and seconds later a temporary password for your new account will arrive on your mobile phone. You can then log in to your account, and explore how SchoolAlert works.
Your new account is fully functional with no limitations, except that it expires after seven days. We even give you a $2 credit so you can try the SMS and voice delivery options.
If you like what you see, simply click the payment link and generate an invoice or pay by credit card. Or if you decide SchoolAlert isn't right for your school, contact us and we'll cancel your account without any fuss.
Voice is a great option for more technophobic recipients, and is often cheaper than SMS. SchoolAlert takes your alert text and turns it into surprisingly realistic speech using voice synthesis, which we then play down the line to your recipients.
We add "This is an alert from (your school name)" to the start and "This message will now repeat - hang up when you are ready" to the end, and then repeat it three times so people can confirm anything they missed the first time around.
This also works with answering machines. Although the first part of the message may not be recorded because of the answerphone message, the second and third repeats will be.
SchoolAlert provides a unique preferences link for your school. We recommend you include this on your website, and we also include it at the end of every email alert.
The first time a recipient clicks the preferences link, an authentication process makes sure they are who they say they are. From then on, clicking the link takes them straight to SchoolAlert's simple mobile-friendly preferences page.
The preferences page allows people to update their details, including adding or changing email addresses and phone numbers. They can also choose which public lists they want to be in.
Your information is as safe as we can make it, and we're pretty good at web security. Our development team has more than 20 years of experience in building secure web services, including one used by a high-profile bank. This service regularly passes audit and random penetration-tests by the bank’s security team, so we are confident that our security framework is effective and up-to-date with best practises.
SchoolAlert's data is encrypted and held in several redundant international datacenters. This far more secure than if it lived on a server in your office, because modern web security makes it far easier to burgle your school than to hack into Google's data centers.
Finally, unlike some online services, we believe your data is your property. You have trusted us to hold it and we will protect it to the best of our ability, but it is not ours to use, sell or give to anyone else. See our privacy policy for more details.
Probably nothing. SchoolAlert works well with all modern browsers on mobile or desktop devices: