If your school is on a commercial CMS, the contract is probably more painful than the software.
Most independent schools I meet are on Finalsite, Blackbaud Web Services, or SchoolDash. The sites look fine. The contracts don’t. This page lays out what changes when a school moves to Bright Presence Digital — straight, no sales math.
Your specific numbers are yours. Send your last invoice and I’ll price it on a napkin. No NDA required.
“But doesn’t Finalsite bundle everything?”
Not really. Look at your actual vendor list. Student records sit in Blackbaud K-12 or Veracross. Tuition billing runs through FACTS or TADS. Financial aid goes through SSS or Clarity. Transcripts go through Parchment. Admissions runs on Ravenna or Blackbaud Enrollment. Finalsite is mostly your CMS and your admissions inquiry funnel.
That’s already the same link-out model I run — just with a much bigger license fee and a template-driven front door. Moving to BPD doesn’t disrupt your existing specialist stack. It replaces the expensive, slow, templated CMS layer with a hand-built one. Your student data relationships stay exactly where they are.
Put another way: the best SIS, the best billing system, the best aid processor, and the best website — versus four mid-tier tools from one vendor under one roof. Sophisticated school operators pick best-of-breed every time.
Side by side.
Deliberately qualitative — every school’s numbers are different. Bring your invoice; I’ll do the math with you.
| Typical commercial school CMS | Bright Presence Digital | |
|---|---|---|
| Annual cost | Multi-thousands per year, with annual price increases standard. | A fraction of the commercial CMS price. Flat annual retainer; priced to your scope, not tier-locked. |
| Onboarding + launch | 6 – 12 months typical. | 4 – 6 weeks from contract to launch. |
| Who edits your site | Your Communications Director through a ticketing portal. Complex edits routed to a Client Success rep. | Anyone you give a login to, through a simple CMS. Complex edits you email directly. Same-day turnaround. |
| Content-edit turnaround | 2 – 5 business days per vendor SLA. | Same business day for typical changes; within an hour for urgent alerts. |
| Design | Template family. Color and typography within platform constraints. Redesigns re-billed. | Hand-built to your school. Refresh cycles included in the retainer. |
| Custom features | Billable services at agency rates, scoped in advance, platform-constrained. | Scoped into the retainer or a fixed fee. Admissions portals, alumni directories, tour forms — built in-house. |
| Day-to-day contact | Account Executive → Client Success Manager → Tier-2 Support → Engineering | Direct line to the developer who built your site. |
| Performance | Typical Lighthouse Performance on template-hosted schools: 40 – 60. Home pages often 3 – 6 MB. | BPD sites target Lighthouse 75+. Home pages under 700 KB once real imagery ships. |
| Accessibility | Platform-level WCAG 2.1 AA baseline. Site-specific issues follow the platform release cycle. | WCAG 2.1 AA at initial delivery. Accessibility reports acknowledged within 2 business days. |
| Who owns your data | Vendor platform. Content export typically offered as HTML dump; custom code remains vendor IP. | You do. Complete handoff at any time, no exit fee. Host it wherever you want. |
| Student records / grades / tuition | Often separate specialist vendors anyway (Blackbaud, FACTS, etc.) — bundled billing, not bundled technology. | I never touch regulated student data. Those flows stay with your specialist vendors, directly. |
| Contract transparency | Multi-year term, auto-renew, price-increase clauses common. | Annual term, no auto-renew, 60-day termination for convenience. Published legal pages. |
| Liability you’re exposed to | Vendor platform outages, data-handling breaches, template accessibility failures — as defined by their contract. | My liability is limited and my scope is narrow. Your student data never touches my infrastructure — lower risk for your school, explicitly. |
Four to six weeks, not a year.
Week 1 — Discovery & design
Two calls with your Head of School and Communications lead. I tour your current site, pull audit data, and come back with a design direction and a migration plan. Your trustees see the plan before I write code.
Weeks 2–4 — Build & content migration
I build the site. Your Communications team reviews pages as they finish, not all at the end. Content comes over from the old CMS in daily batches. You approve each page before it goes live.
Week 5 — Training & soft launch
Your team learns the CMS in a single 90-minute session (it’s that simple). We set up staging, run it in parallel with your old site for a week, and fix what comes up.
Week 6 — Launch, DNS cutover, done
DNS flips. Old site redirects cleanly to new URLs so no search traffic is lost. You start saving on the old license bill immediately.
No surprises. No hidden tiers.
- Hosting on a dedicated private server, targeted 99.5% uptime, triple-redundant backups.
- All content edits you email me — same business day during business hours.
- Annual design refresh included. Accessibility remediation handled in-retainer when reports come in.
- SSL, backups, security patches — I handle all of it.
- Privacy-first analytics dashboard — no Google Analytics unless you want it.
- Clean connectors to your existing stack — Blackbaud, FACTS, Ravenna, Veracross, SchoolAdmin, or whatever else you run.
- One phone number. I pick up.
Send me your last invoice.
Whatever CMS you’re on. I’ll walk through exactly what you’re paying for, what BPD would replace, and what the savings actually look like for your school. No deck. No sales engineer. Just a developer who’s built the thing.