Communication is a school sending. Engagement is the back and forth. Basin is where your school coordinates, communicates, and collects the everyday fees that aren't tuition, and where you can see who read each message and who answered. It reads your roster, so nothing is entered twice, and your SIS stays the system of record.
Free for one semester, one grade. If the front desk isn't quieter, we remove everything and you've lost nothing.
What a pile of separate tools cannot do
Teachers, coaches, after-school and the head's office each send with good intent, and the family still gets buried. No one sender can see the total, and neither can five apps that don't talk to each other. Basin counts it per family, and tells you before you add to it.
The Alvarez family
Head of School
2
3rd grade teacher
2
Cross-country coach
1
After-school program
1
Athletics director
1
Music teacher
1
At compose time: “14 families in this audience have already received 3 or more messages this week.”
A made-up family, to show the shape of it.
What's included
Smart-routed broadcastsSee how →
Send once by grade, classroom, or activity. See who got it, who read it, who responded.
Sick-day cover, matchedSee how →
Each substitute's days, grades and subjects on file. A request reaches only the people who fit, and the first yes takes it.
Forms, tracked to done
Permission slips and re-enrollment in the app parents already check. Completion in real time.
After-school, self-serve
Register, waitlist, cancel. Capacity and grade rules built in.
Event volunteers, one rosterSee how →
One link, one list, instructions included.
Parent chat, included
Families get Koalie for classroom parent-to-parent chat. The school doesn't moderate it, and doesn't have to.
Also included
The pilot
One semester, one grade, no cost. If the front desk is quieter and families are clearer, we talk pricing. If not, we delete the pilot data and part cleanly.
15 minutes on what's actually costing front-desk time.
A live walkthrough with your scenarios.
One grade live, 15-20 families, zero cost.
Measure together: calls avoided, form turnaround, read rates.
School-wide, or we remove everything and part cleanly.
After that
$500–2,500/year
up to 1,500 students, then $1.50/student/year above that. Everything included, no feature tiers.
Payments are optional: Basin takes 1.5%$5,000capped at $1,000, and tuition never runs through Basin.
Some SIS vendors charge for the API access live sync needs, typically around $500 a year, billed by them. A roster export works from day one at no extra cost.
Basin is not a gradebook, not transcripts, not tuition billing. Those stay in your SIS, and no teacher enters the same thing twice. Full academic records stay where they are. No SSNs, no financial account numbers, ever. We do not sell data or use it for advertising, and parent-to-parent chat is private by design.
No SIS? Smaller schools, co-ops and clubs can run Basin as their first coordination layer.
Before you ask
Email still matters. Basin adds push notifications with read receipts, so you know who actually saw the time-sensitive messages.
Most schools do: one for teams, one for sign-ups, one for forms. Basin doesn't rip those out on day one. It becomes the place parents check first.
When the school makes it the official channel, the same way it did for the portal or the carline app, families follow. The free pilot is how you prove that gently.
Teachers get notified when a parent reaches out. They don't run a dashboard. Admins do.
Not yet. You would be the first, which is exactly why the pilot is free, why it is one grade rather than the whole school, and why we delete everything if it doesn't work. The demo above is our own invented school, not a customer.