Why is it free?

No catch. Here's how that works.

ClassDa.sh is free: no accounts, no licences, no “premium” version waiting behind the tools your class uses. A school asks fair questions about a free tool: who pays, what they get out of it, and whether it will still be there in the spring. The answers are below.

No adsNothing to sell, no dataNo sign-upYour class is a file you own

Who made it

One former teacher, with no investors and no advertisers

ClassDa.sh is made and run by one person, David, a former teacher. It grew out of the same idea as his other free tools for K–6 classrooms, ClassCake, TV on a Rolling Cart and Your State Standards: a school day asks a lot of one teacher, and the tools that help shouldn't cost the teacher money or the children their privacy. There are no investors to satisfy and no advertisers to serve.

What it costs

Very little, by design

Most education software is expensive to run because it keeps every student's data on its own servers: databases, accounts, backups, security staff. ClassDa.sh keeps nothing. It is a set of files that your browser downloads once and then runs on the teacher's own computer, where the class list, points and attendance stay. We have no database because we have nothing to put in one.

Hosting is a static website, the cheapest kind there is, and it costs about the same for one classroom as for thousands.
The weather comes from the US National Weather Service, which is free to everyone.
Videos a teacher chooses play from YouTube, Vimeo and the like, under those sites' own terms, not through us.
The work of building it is the real cost, and that's David's time.

Because there's no per-classroom cost, there's no reason to charge per classroom.

Who pays

David does, and anyone who chooses to chip in

The running costs come out of David's pocket. Teachers who find it useful can support it on Ko-fi; that's a tip, never a requirement, and nothing on the board is held back from anyone who doesn't. Schools and districts can't buy ClassDa.sh, because there's nothing to buy. If your school wants to help, the most useful things are free too: tell a colleague, and let your IT team know it's safe to allow (here's what they'll want to know).

What free means here

Every tool on the board, for every teacher, with no trial period and no feature behind a paywall.
No advertising, anywhere, ever in front of children.
No student data to sell, share or lose: it never reaches us (see the privacy policy).
No accounts, so no passwords to forget and no “upgrade your plan” emails.

What it doesn't mean

We don't say “free forever”, because nobody can honestly promise what the next decade holds.
It isn't a charity or a grant-funded project with an end date; it's a tool one person keeps up because teachers use it.
It isn't supported by a help desk. Email reaches David directly and he answers, but there's no phone line.

What we promise

If anything about this changes, you'll read it here first

The board will never show ads to a class, and we will never start collecting student information. The privacy policy says the same, and we'll keep it that way.
If the way ClassDa.sh is paid for ever has to change, we'll say so on this page and the About page before it does, in plain words.
Your class is never locked in. It lives on your own computer and in the .classdash classroom file you save, a plain, documented file that is yours to keep, move or delete.

If the site went away

Your class wouldn't go with it

Because the board runs on your own computer, it keeps working offline after the first visit, even if classda.sh were unreachable for a day or for good. Your records are in the browser on your device and in your classroom file, and the reports and the spreadsheet export are made on your device too. Nothing about your class is sitting on a server somewhere that could be switched off. That's not a workaround; it's how ClassDa.sh was built.

Questions

Ask

Anything this page doesn't answer: david@classda.sh. School and district questions about security are on the trust and security page, and the paperwork a district usually wants (a data privacy agreement, an accessibility conformance report) is there too.