Try to find out what school timetabling software costs. Genuinely try it, as a deputy head with an hour between lessons.
Untis publishes no price list for Germany; you contact a regional partner for a quote. aSc's own prices page carries editions but no figures, and what you pay depends on which country you are in and which reseller you reach. EduPage's pricing page is a contact form. Several newer web tools render their pricing table only after a script loads, so it is invisible to anyone whose browser did not cooperate.
Somewhere in that hour, the deputy head gives up and asks the school next door what they paid — which is how pricing information actually circulates in this industry.
What opacity is for
To be fair to the incumbents, hidden pricing is not always cynical. There are real reasons.
Prices genuinely vary: by school size, by country, by whether a state licence covers you, by which modules you take. A single number would be a simplification, and a partner network needs room to price for its own market. Some of this is legitimate.
But the effect, whatever the intent, is uniform. The buyer cannot compare. They cannot judge whether the quote is good. They cannot budget without starting a sales conversation, and — the part that matters most — they cannot evaluate your product privately, on their own time, before talking to anyone.
What we do instead
Our prices are on the pricing page, in euros, rendered in plain HTML — visible without JavaScript, without a form, without a call, from any country.
- Free month, €0. One month of the complete solver and interface. Import your data, run generations, build a real timetable — nothing is withheld, and no card is needed. Choose a plan before the month ends to keep going.
- Standard, €490/year. One school, class-based timetabling, every feature, unlimited users.
- Pro (student-based), €1,490/year — founding price €990 through the 2026/27 year. Adds scheduling by individual student course choices.
- University, from €4,990/year. Quote-based, because higher education genuinely does scale with institution size.
Three of the four are public numbers. The fourth is honestly labelled as a quote with a published floor, which is a different thing from "contact us."
Three commitments behind the numbers
No modules. Everything the product does is in the price. When substitution planning ships, Standard plan customers get substitution planning; it will not appear as a €600 line item. This is a constraint we are accepting deliberately, and it will occasionally cost us revenue — that is what makes it worth stating.
No per-seat maths. Unlimited users. Charging per user in a school means the deputy head who needs to check one thing does not get an account, which makes the software worse for everyone.
Fixed annual terms. Twelve months, cancel at the end. Not because subscriptions are fashionable — because in German public procurement an indefinite auto-renewing contract is assessed at roughly four times its annual value, which can push a €1,490 tool over a state's direct-award threshold and force a three-quote process for no reason. A fixed term keeps a small purchase small.
We are not the cheapest, and that is the point
Transparency cuts both ways, so here is the uncomfortable comparison.
aSc sells a perpetual licence. Annualised over five years its mid-tier edition works out well below our subscription. If your only criterion is five-year total cost and you are content with desktop software, aSc wins that comparison and we would rather you knew.
And in Berlin and Brandenburg, Untis is free to public schools through a state licence. We cannot compete with zero, and we will not pretend the difference is worth arguing about on price. If the state pays for your timetabling software, the case for switching has to be that the engine, the transparency or the interface are worth real money — and sometimes they are not.
What our price includes that a perpetual licence does not: hosting, updates, backups, support, and the absence of a server someone at your school has to maintain. Whether that is worth the difference is a judgement, and it is one you can only make if you can see both numbers.
The actual reason
Published pricing is not primarily a moral position. It is a bet about how schools buy.
A deputy head evaluating software at 21:00 is not going to book a sales call. If they cannot find out what it costs, they close the tab — and we never learn they existed. Every hidden price is a filter that removes exactly the self-serve buyer we are built for.
So the transparency is partly principle and partly self-interest. We think that is the most honest way to describe it, and it is also why we expect it to survive contact with our own sales pressure. Positions that only cost you tend not to last.
Current prices are always on the pricing page. If they change, they change in public — and subscribers keep the price they signed up at.