The questions schools and studios actually ask — answered straight.

The book is print-on-demand with a soft markup: your retail price is your real print cost times a markup you set, at or above the cost floor. There is no contract, no minimum order, and no overprint — you pay for books people actually buy. Picture-day portrait packages and recognition ads are tiered by what’s included and by size. The specific prices are owner-configured in the platform and shared during onboarding — and your exact book price comes from a live print quote against your trim and page count. See how pricing works or get a quote.

No per-seat license. We are monetized by a share of the transactions that already flow — a slice of book and portrait net, and the card-fee-only margin on ads — a deliberately modest take. For a studio that owns picture day, the software is free: the studio keeps the largest portrait leg and we earn our residual on the same orders. The exact take-rate is owner-set and shared during onboarding. We win on breadth and volume, not a seat count.

No. A cost floor is enforced in code: a retail price below the live print cost is rejected at checkout, so a book can never be sold at a loss — even if someone fat-fingers the markup. Promo codes discount on top but are capped at an owner-set limit, and the floor still holds underneath them.

That multi-year exclusive — the “Term” the Big-4 reps sell — is genuinely real, and it is their advantage, not your benefit. Homeroom is no-contract, no-minimum, no-overprint by design, so you can run one school or one publication alongside your incumbent for a season and compare the numbers before you move anything. Print-on-demand means there is no leftover-inventory risk to running a small pilot. When your Term ends, the switch is a decision, not an escape.

You bring your student list and your sign-on in one sitting: single sign-on the standard ways your district already logs in, plus a standard import from your student-information system and the standard photo-lab file for picture day. Pages are built in our editor rather than copied pixel-for-pixel from a competitor’s private file format — which is honest: a true round-trip of another vendor’s book file is not something we (or they) offer. Most pilots start a fresh publication, or rebuild a section, precisely because there is no contract forcing an all-or-nothing cutover. Student list & sign-on shipped

There is no lock-in on the way out either. Your finished publication exports as a print-ready PDF (with fonts embedded), and your roster and content are yours to take. We never reintroduce a forced-overprint or minimum-order commitment that would strand inventory on your shelves — that pain is exactly the wedge we were built against.

Finding a child is a student-list lookup, not a face match — so for the core flow no face data is created at all. Facial recognition is off unless a parent turns it on, and any face template is kept only in our own private system and destroyed when consent is withdrawn or at the end of the school’s retention schedule (a year by default). Student photos are never sold — a photo is sellable only when permission allows, blocked by default. This is the opposite of the combined-package-vendor model, where every child’s portrait is sent to a vendor cloud for facial-recognition matching. Facial recognition off by default — shipped

By the school’s student list, not a face match. A guardian proves their student through a claim code or a match against the school’s student list — the same trusted source the gradebook uses — and that resolves which portraits are theirs. It is a look-up the school already trusts, not a surveillance feature. Any optional, parent-opted-in face-assisted cropping is permission-checked and returns only boxes and key points; the enrolled face template is kept only in our own private system and destroyed when consent is withdrawn or at the end of the school’s retention schedule (a year by default). Student-list lookup shipped

No. A studio, a sales rep, or a sales account reads zero student rows. That is not a policy promise — it is a hard rule inside the database, proven against a real database across the full student record: a studio or rep session returns no student records even with the school in scope. Reps see totals, adult contacts, and money reconciliation; never a child’s record. The same kind of rule enforces a single-school FERPA wall, so an adviser at one school cannot read another school’s students either. FERPA & sales-rep walls shipped

Selling a likeness is a commercial use, which the school’s educational COPPA attestation does not cover — so a portrait of an under-13 or unknown-DOB student is unsellable until verifiable parental consent, captured naturally when the guardian claims their student and checks out. Every gate blocks by default: no consent on file means no sale, enforced in code (the consent gate), not by a checkbox someone could forget. A do-not-publish or opt-out student is suppressed end-to-end. The binding terms and the data-controller relationship live in the in-app policy your administrator agrees to; the final compliance artifacts are in counsel review.

Honestly: a Data Processing Addendum, a privacy policy, a COPPA disclosure, a security overview, and a sub-processor list all exist as engineering-grounded drafts in counsel review — they are not yet final, and we will not pretend otherwise. Our accessibility conformance is currently code-review-grounded, with an independent audit on the path to an externally-attested VPAT. We’ll share the current drafts and the review status up front, because your counsel signing our DPA is a real step we plan for, not paper over.

A studio that runs picture day keeps the largest leg. A portrait order settles on the net amount and splits four ways — studio, photographer, school, and platform — with each share locked in when the payout is created, on a tamper-proof add-only ledger; the studio keeps the biggest share by design and the school keeps a fundraising leg. If you run picture day in-house instead of with an outside studio, that studio leg goes to the school, so the school keeps the lion’s share — you are never the leg that gets squeezed. The exact percentages are owner-configured and shared during onboarding. This is the inverse of the established companies’ model, where the vendor captures the whole portrait pool.

The big end-to-end portrait operations genuinely do run the whole thing — that part is fair to them. The trade-off is that “handles everything” often means sending your students’ faces to an outside AI cloud: portraits are shipped to a face-matching cloud, and the parent-portrait sales profit is the vendor’s, not the school’s. With Homeroom the school (or your studio) keeps the portrait profit, student photos are never sold without permission, and facial recognition is off unless a parent turns it on. That is the whole pitch — not that they do nothing, but that you keep the consent controls and the money.

Per-student personal pages, print-on-demand with no overprint, and a fundraising lane where the whole gift goes to the school are all shipped here. What we add on top is the photography-revenue machine — the picture-day pipeline where photos are never sold without consent and facial recognition is off by default, plus the parent-portrait split — and a newsroom for all your publications with teach-as-you-build curriculum, so the whole student publications program lives in one place instead of a page builder bolted onto a print order. Personal pages & fundraising shipped

Live today: the desktop-class book builder (undo and redo, version history, layers, masking, auto-layout, brand-locking, full keyboard control), one student list for the yearbook, newspaper, literary magazine, and public online editions, the newsroom workflow (a story moves from a pitch, to an assignment, to a draft, through a section editor, to the editor-in-chief, and only then to the reader), the ad-sales engine, the fundraising lane where the whole gift goes to the school, the picture-day pipeline with a consent-gated commerce gate where photos are never sold without permission and facial recognition is off by default, the student-records foundation (online registration with permission at sign-up, the roster, terms and periods, enrollment, guardians, and class assignments), the FERPA and sales-rep privacy walls, and print-on-demand with a print check that refuses a broken job and embeds every font. The rest of the records suite — attendance, transcripts, special-education (IEP and 504) authoring, behavior, and meal accounts — is new and growing on the same spine. Shipped

In early access, building now on a foundation that is already live: the parent portrait store and its four-way split that pays the school (building now on the shipped capture pipeline and consent gate), pay-over-time installments at checkout, live text-message sending (absence alerts and crew shift offers, which turn on once a text provider is connected), the suggestion-style AI helpers (photo captions, alt text, and theme ideas, which turn on once an AI service is set up), and a cooperative-purchasing vehicle for districts that want to skip a formal bid. We show these as the near-term plan, never as live. Early access

Open it and watch — we’d rather show than claim. Undo and redo, version history, layers, masking, auto-layout, brand-locking, full keyboard control, zoom-a-photo-inside-its-frame, and adjustable drop shadows are shipped and tested. And it is one tool, not the beginner-tool-versus-pro-tool split the established companies ship (a simple online designer for most users and a separate Adobe-grade path for the few). It also has a beginner mode (templates plus coaching) and a full mode (every tool), so a new staff and a veteran program both fit. Editor shipped

We’re honest about this rather than impressive about it. What is shipped is the consent discipline: photos are never sold without permission, facial recognition is off by default, and student data stays behind a consent gate. The image tools themselves — face detection (boxes and key points only, never a face signature), one-tap background removal, and sharpening a low-quality candid to print quality — are turning on as the image models behind them come online, so we mark them in early access. The suggestion-style helpers — photo captions, alt text, and theme ideas — are also in early access: they suggest, you accept or edit, and they turn on once the in-house service is set up. They fail loudly when that service is absent — they never fake canned text and pass it off as real AI. Consent gate shipped Image & suggestion tools in early access

For a pilot we keep the loop small and observable: one studio (or one school) and one to three publications, with a single point of contact who does the platform setup while your adviser owns the roster, the consent capture, and the book. Provisioning a studio or a school is a shipped self-service flow, and a school can be onboarded — roster, SSO, brand — in one sitting. We define your success metrics with you before go-live so renewal is a number, not a vibe.

No multi-year exclusive, no auto-renewing “Term,” no minimum-order commitment, and no forced overprint. A pilot is a short, plain agreement for one to three publications. The compliance paperwork your district needs — the DPA in particular — is in counsel review, and your counsel signing it is a planned step we’ll walk through, not something we’ll rush you past. You stay because the economics and the tool are good, not because a contract traps you.

Honestly, not yet — but it’s the near-term district unlock, not a live feature. A cooperative-purchasing vehicle (a lead contract a district can piggyback) plus enrollment-tiered pricing is on the roadmap so a district can skip its own RFP. We name it as building, not shipped. Cooperative purchasing in early access