IN THIS ARTICLE▾
Recurv's preschool billing pricing has no annual contract and no minimum fee, making it viable for a single-site, single-owner centre.
A single-site preschool with forty children on monthly fees of R2,500 to R4,000 runs on genuinely thin margins. Every rand spent on admin tools is a rand not available for staff wages, learning materials, or the maintenance the building always seems to need. When that same owner looks into automating fee collection through a bank's debit-order portal, the numbers often don't work at all: a monthly minimum, sometimes R5,000 or more, or an upfront deposit that can exceed what the centre would spend on admin tools in a full year otherwise.
This piece is about pricing that doesn't create that wall, built to work for a business run by one owner, on the margins this sector actually has.
Why bank minimums exclude this business specifically
Bank debit-order portals set minimums and deposit requirements because their internal cost of servicing any client is roughly fixed, regardless of size. For a larger business, a R5,000 monthly minimum is a rounding error. For a preschool collecting perhaps R120,000 to R160,000 a month in total fees from forty families, that same minimum is a real, noticeable cost, one that can make automating collection feel like it costs more than it saves, even though the actual admin-time savings would be significant.
What a no-minimum, two-stream model looks like
Recurv's pricing separates into a modest fixed monthly platform fee, set low enough to make sense for a single-site, single-owner business, plus a per-debit transaction fee that scales with how many debits actually run. There's no deposit required to get started, and no minimum that assumes a much larger volume of billing than a forty- or fifty-child centre actually generates.
A small centre pays for what it uses: a manageable fixed fee plus transaction costs proportional to its own roster, not a floor calibrated for a business several times its size.
Why month-to-month matters for a first-time software buyer
Many preschool owners are trying billing software for the first time, and reasonably want to see it work before committing further. A month-to-month commercial term, with no annual contract required upfront, means the owner can start with a season's worth of billing, see exactly how it performs, and decide from there, without having signed a year-long agreement on the strength of a demo alone.
What this means for the centre's own budget
The fixed monthly platform fee is one predictable line the owner can plan against, alongside rent, staff wages, and supplies. The transaction fee scales with actual billing volume, so it moves in step with the size of the roster rather than sitting as a flat cost regardless of how many families are actually being billed that month.
What this means as the centre grows
A centre that starts at thirty children and grows to sixty over a couple of years doesn't hit a pricing cliff along the way. The cost scales with the roster naturally, the same structure applying at every size, rather than the owner needing to renegotiate or upgrade to a different pricing tier as enrolment grows.
What this isn't
It isn't free, the fixed platform fee and the per-debit transaction cost are real, budgeted costs. What's different is the absence of a deposit or a minimum sized for a business much larger than a typical single-site preschool.
It isn't a claim that every centre, regardless of size, will find automated billing worthwhile. A very small operation with a handful of children on informal, cash-based fees may reasonably continue with manual collection until the roster grows enough to justify the switch.
It also isn't a one-time decision the owner is stuck with. Month-to-month terms mean the centre can start, evaluate the actual experience over a term or two, and decide from there whether and how to continue, without a long-term commitment made before the system has proven itself.
Related reading
See how Recurv handles recurring billing for preprimary schools & ecd centres.
View Preprimary Schools & ECD Centres use case →