Three prices. Published, and accounted for.
Most firms make you sit through a call to hear a number. Here are ours. Three fixed prices, what each one buys, the vendor cost that forces every step up, and the case where you should buy the cheaper one instead.
The Log
One shared record of what actually happened, replacing the spreadsheet nobody trusts. It runs on a machine you already own, so it costs nothing to keep.
- One structured record of every session, request, hour, or case
- The report your board or director asks for, generated instead of rebuilt
- Your existing spreadsheet years imported, not retyped
- A training session and a runbook for the person who will own it
Right for you if: A single coordinator who mostly needs the numbers to stop disagreeing with each other.
The Program
Most chosenEverything in The Log, online for your whole team at once, secured for real records, and sending its own reminders so nobody has to chase anyone.
- Everything in The Log
- Hosted so staff, students, volunteers, or clients all reach it at once
- Named accounts, roles, encryption, daily backups, and an audit log
- Automatic email reminders and nudges that go out without you
- A live dashboard leadership can open any day of the week
Right for you if: A program with more than a handful of people in it, or any program holding records about students or clients.
The Program Plus
Everything in The Program, plus the reporting layer your funders ask for and the ability to change the forms and surveys yourself, without calling us.
- Everything in The Program
- Funder-ready and board-ready reporting, exported in one click
- Surveys, review forms, and check-ins you edit yourself
- Trend, cohort, and participation analytics across the whole program
Right for you if: A program that reports to a funder or a board on a schedule, and changes its own forms more than once a year.
Where the $4,950 actually goes
Ordered from the cheapest thing that would genuinely finish the job to the full system. Each step exists because a real cost forces it, not because it sounded like a good upsell.
- 01One shared log
Someone records what happened. You open it and see. This is the floor, and for a small enough program it is the whole answer.
$2,450 - 02Everyone can reach it
The moment more than one person needs it at once, it has to be online with a real database behind it. This is the first honest upcharge, and it is where a monthly hosting cost first appears.
$900 - 03It is secured
Accounts, roles, encryption, daily backups, monitoring. If the records describe students or clients, this is not optional polish.
$700 - 04It runs itself
A verified sending address and a transactional email provider, so reminders and nudges go out whether or not anyone remembered.
$900 - The Program$4,950
What you pay, every month, that does not come to us
Published list prices, passed through at cost. No markup from us. You can hold these accounts yourself and pay us nothing for them.
- Application hosting$20
- Managed database with daily backups$25
- Transactional email$20
- Domain nameabout $2
- About 250 active accounts
- About 25,000 emails a month
- About 50 gigabytes of transfer a month
Every one of these services bills by usage above an included allowance, so $67 is an estimate at a normal size rather than a fixed price, and each vendor can change its own published prices. If you hold the accounts, you pay whatever they bill and we neither control it nor profit from it. If we hold them under the care plan, the plan moves by the amount the vendor bill actually moved, at cost, with the invoice shown, on thirty days written notice, and it moves back down again when usage falls. You can always cancel rather than accept an increase.
Care plan
- We hold the vendor accounts so you never touch a billing portal
- Monitoring, security updates, and daily backup checks
- Small changes and fixes as the program shifts
- One phone number when something looks wrong
- Cancel at any month. The system keeps running without us
Retained operations
For institutions that need someone inside the work week after week rather than a single build: a fixed weekly commitment across an academic year or a fiscal year, invoiced as one agreement with a scope, terms, and a signature block for both parties. Priced per engagement. Ask on the call.
Morgan State University’s Division of Student Affairs has retained us on exactly this basis for the 2026-27 academic year.
When it pays for itself
Worked at a loaded staff cost of $36 an hour across 46 working weeks, against The Program at $4,950 with $804 a year of vendor costs subtracted first. Substitute your own rate on the call and we will redo it in front of you.
| Manual work removed | Value returned | Net of run cost | Pays for itself in |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2 hours a week | $3,312 a year | $2,508 | 24 months |
| 4 hours a week | $6,624 a year | $5,820 | 10 months |
| 6 hours a week | $9,936 a year | $9,132 | 7 months |
Below about two hours a week, The Program takes more than two years to pay for itself and we will tell you to buy The Log instead, or to keep the spreadsheet for another year. Naming the case where you should not hire us costs us nothing, because that engagement was never going to end well anyway.
Against a subscription product
Named products publish no pricing, so we will not invent theirs. Compare on structure instead, which you can verify.
| A subscription product | Systems by Design | |
|---|---|---|
| How you pay | Per seat or per user, every year, forever | Once, at a fixed price agreed in writing before work starts |
| What you own at the end | A licence that ends when you stop paying | The code and the data, in accounts under your name |
| Who changes a survey or a form | A support ticket, on their release schedule | You do, on The Program Plus. Or we do, same week |
| Built for | The average of every customer they have | The way your program actually runs, mapped in week one |
| Who you call | A queue | The person who built it |
When we are the wrong call
- The manual work you want gone takes less than about two hours a week. The arithmetic does not clear.
- You need a licensed product with a vendor support desk and a procurement checklist for it. Buy the licence.
- The process is still being argued about internally. Settle who decides what first. A system will make a bad process run faster, not better.
- You want a report designed, not a system installed. That is a smaller job than we are set up for.
Not sure which rung fits? Run the two minute assessment or send us the bottleneck.