Why to Make Your App Free for Education | Hacker News Reader

Why to Make Your App Free for Education

lucidchart.com

25 pointsdmgrow7 comments

Not sure this is such a good idea. I operate a similar business and most of our profit comes from educational customers. Universities have massive budgets and a few thousand dollars is peanuts to them. School boards also tend to have large budgets, although it tends to be cyclical.

I think the best option is to have a free, limited version and then offer more features for a price. I notice that lucidchart doesn't have any free version for teams.

There is a free team account for educators they just have to apply for it.

Yes, I know - that is the whole point of the article. What I meant is that they don't generally have a free team version. It would be better perhaps to have a limited free version for everyone, and then charge educators if they want a more advanced version rather than giving them the crown jewels for free. Just my opinion based on selling a similar offering to this market for over 15 years.

While I have no argument with the "free for education" approach, I think that the statement In many states, K-12 budgets are the first to be cut could use some backup. I have often seen school systems complaining they don't have enough, but can't recall it ever being due to an actual cut. In fact nationwide[1] we spend more per student on public education than we ever have.

[1] http://www2.ed.gov/about/overview/fed/10facts/edlite-chart.h...

It looks like all of the charts on that page end in about 2006. The last few years have been quite different. This report includes a comparison of percent change in per student spending in fiscal year 2012 to fiscal year 2008 in each state:

http://www.cbpp.org/cms/?fa=view&id=3569

The majority of states have seen declines -- some quite significant.

Speaking as a teacher, while your 5-points are very good, there's a happy medium here you can hit between free and paid.

Individual teachers have minuscule discretionary budgets (either $0 flat or up to a few hundred for everything). Departments in a school have a bit more (usually hundreds to thousands once textbooks are paid for). Schools and school districts have more money to talk about.

The pace of adoption is the exact opposite. Teachers are willing to try something new, and will show it to their friends/coworkers if it's awesome. School districts are slow to adopt new technology, and rarely turnkey it to other district (schools have their own NIH syndrome).

You want to find a way to make the individual teachers happy and seek out your tool, but also give them a reason for their supervisors to want to pay you. Think about what an org chart for a school would look like. Each teacher has 15-150 students who report to them. They'll collaborate with the other teachers, and all report to a supervisor, who has their own boss(es).

In a school, you'll probably either want to hit the collaboration between teachers or easy metrics on student performance for the big bosses as your pain points. It won't stop us from using your program for free, but it'll give the people with money a reason to want to implement it in the entire school.

"An entire generation of teachers and administrators is embracing the belief that technology will allow teachers and students to work together more effectively, to research more broadly, to share more generously, and to learn more passionately."

As a teacher and member of that generation, thankyou.

Are there any other awesome product like lucidchart available free of charge to K-12 schools?

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