Built because of one invoice
A studio owner said it in one sentence: “Jackrabbit bumped me to the next tier mid-semester because I got three more students.” That is a pricing model working exactly as designed, and it is the reason this product exists.
Semesterstart is class, enrolment and invoicing software for private dance, music, martial-arts and kids' activity studios — the ones running terms, registers and invoices, and paying a software bill that follows their enrolment upward. It is free. Not per student, not per teacher, and not more next term because a good week happened.
Why it is free
Because one more studio costs us almost nothing beyond hosting — servers, a database, backups and email, shared across everything Pixygon runs. Putting a price on that would mean building billing, dunning and a support queue to collect an amount that barely covers the collecting. The expensive parts stay outside anyway: Vipps and Stripe handle your families' money on your own accounts and charge their own fees there.
What free cannot buy is unlimited human time. Support is email, from the people who build it, answered in days rather than minutes. We would rather say that here than discover it together later.
Four promises
No per-seat pricing
Not per student, not per teacher, not per location. Free for the studio, and no threshold anywhere in it.
No dark patterns
No countdown timers, no fake scarcity, no plan that renews at a different number than the one you agreed to, and cancelling takes one click and no phone call.
Your data leaves with you
Students, classes, attendance and balances export in full, any day — including the day you decide to leave.
Free stays free
If that ever has to change, studios already here hear it from us first, in writing, before it does — and nothing you already run starts costing money without you choosing it.
Where it is now
In build, and openly so. No studio is using it yet and there is nothing to buy. What exists today is the decision: free, the feature list it has to cover, and the guides on this site about how the rest of the market prices the same job.
Semesterstart is made by Pixygon, a small software studio in Eidsvoll, Norway. Questions go to pixygon@pixygon.io.