The quotation is rarely the price. Here is where the rest of it hides, with real figures, including ours.
Nearly all of it is priced per student per term, which is the right shape: a school of two hundred should not pay what a school of nine hundred pays. What varies is everything around that number.
A per-student rate without a floor means a very small school pays almost nothing, which sounds generous until the supplier decides it is not worth serving them. A rate without a ceiling means a large school is punished for growing. A quotation that mentions neither is a quotation you cannot check.
This is the big one, and almost nobody itemises it. Sending SMS in Uganda has two separate costs.
The first is per message — a few tens of shillings each. It sounds trivial until you count: six hundred families, three or four messages a term for results, fees and absences, and you are into the hundreds of thousands of shillings a year.
The second is the one schools never see coming: the sender ID. For a message to arrive from your school's name rather than an anonymous five-digit shortcode, that name has to be registered with each network, and the networks charge a monthly rental for it. In Uganda that is around UGX 250,000 a month, per network. Both MTN and Airtel is roughly half a million a month — six million a year — before a single message is sent.
Ask directly: is the sender ID included, and for which networks? If a supplier charges you a bundle that includes "SMS", find out whether that means the messages, the sender ID, or both.
Getting six hundred students into a new system is real work. Some suppliers include it, some charge a one-off fee, and some quietly expect the school to type it all in. The question to ask is narrower than "is setup included": ask whether students and their classes can be imported from a spreadsheet, because if they can, the work is an afternoon rather than a fortnight.
A first-year discount that is not written down is not a discount, it is a deferral. Ask what the price is in year two and get it in writing.
The cost of leaving is a cost of buying. If your marks and fee records can only come out as screenshots, the price of changing supplier later is retyping years of records — which means the real price of the cheap system is being unable to leave it.
Ours is per student per term with both a floor and a ceiling, so it is checkable. At the time of writing the standard bundle is UGX 2,200 per student per term, with a minimum of 450,000 and a maximum of 1,200,000. A school of four hundred pays 880,000 a term; a school of two thousand pays the same 1,200,000 as a school of six hundred, because past a point our costs stop growing and so should the bill.
The price list works it out for your own number of students rather than making you ring for a quotation.
On SMS we are straight about it: the messaging is built and works, and the sender ID rental is a real cost that has to be paid by somebody before your parents see your school's name on a message. We would rather tell a school that before they sign than surprise them with it in term two.
Put both on the same footing by working out the three-year total for your actual roll:
The cheapest headline rate frequently loses this arithmetic, and it usually loses it on line four.
Work out what your own school would pay, with a slider rather than a conversation.
See the prices