Billing, not the app
Every platform does daily sheets. The one that reliably collects tuition and reconciles it is the one that pays for itself.
Daycare management software
Published 2026-09-04 · 7 min read
Childcare software is a quote-only market. That is not an accident, and it means the useful skill is not reading comparisons — it is writing one specification and sending it to everybody.
A published free tier
Where a vendor publishes a free plan, start there. You will learn your requirements faster than any demo teaches them.
Processing rates
A low per-child fee beside a high card rate is the expensive option at volume. Compare both together or not at all.
Why nobody publishes a price
Because pricing varies with child count, module mix, payment volume and how hard you negotiate — and because a published price invites comparison. Checked live on 2026-09-04, Procare's pricing page was unreachable and Brightwheel's pricing is given on a sales call.
The consequence for a buyer is that comparison articles carrying per-child dollar figures are quoting estimates, not rate cards. Some of those estimates are reasonable; none of them are the price you will be offered.
So stop reading and start specifying. One document, sent to four vendors, produces four comparable quotes in about a fortnight.
The specification to send
Keep it to one page. Number of children by room, number of staff, number of sites, expected monthly tuition volume, and the modules you actually need — attendance and ratio, billing and collection, parent messaging, food programme records if you claim CACFP, and staff scheduling if you want it.
Then ask for the price in a fixed format: per-child per-month fee, any base fee, any per-user fee, setup or migration fee, card and ACH processing rates, and contract term with the monthly option priced separately.
A vendor that will not answer in that format is telling you something useful about how the relationship will go.
| Ask for | Why it matters |
|---|---|
| Per-child monthly fee | The headline, and the least of it |
| Base or platform fee | Hits small programmes hardest |
| Card and ACH rates | Usually the largest real cost |
| Setup or migration fee | Often waived if you ask |
| Family onboarding | Who chases the authorisations |
| Export format on exit | Your leverage at renewal |
| Monthly term price | The premium for not committing |
Send the same seven asks to every vendor and compare the answers side by side. Anything answered with a range rather than a number is not an answer.
Where the products genuinely differ
Not in daily sheets and photos — everybody does those and they demo beautifully. The differences are in billing edge cases, reporting depth, food-programme support, and whether staff scheduling is a real module or a calendar.
Billing edge cases are the sharpest test: a sibling discount, a part-time schedule, a family splitting payment two ways, a subsidy paying part of a place, a late fee applied automatically. Bring all five to the demo.
Food programme support matters if you claim CACFP, because meal counts and menus have to be recorded in a claimable form. A platform that cannot produce the claim is a platform plus a spreadsheet.
The traps
Annual commitment before a full enrolment cycle. Pay the monthly premium until you have run a September and a January on the platform.
Processing rates buried in a separate agreement. They are the largest number in the deal for most programmes and they belong on the same page as the per-child fee.
Migration you do yourself. Moving families onto new payment authorisations is weeks of chasing, and a vendor who runs it is worth real money.
And staff adoption. A platform teachers work around is a platform you pay for while still writing paper sheets.
Sources
- Brightwheel — what Premium includesfetched 2026-09-04
- Procare Solutions — pricing page (returned HTTP 503 on 2026-09-04)fetched 2026-09-04