What should childcare software cost? An honest breakdown

By Del Peck · June 26, 2026

When a director asks me “what does childcare software cost,” the honest answer is: it depends on how many separate vendors you end up stacking. Most centers don’t pay one bill — they pay four. This post breaks down where the money actually goes, so you can compare offers without getting surprised later.

The four buckets most centers pay into

A typical 50-child daycare’s software spend splits roughly like this:

• Parent communication app — daily reports, photos, attendance, check-in. This is the line item most directors think of as “our software.”
• Cameras — a separate service or a self-managed system if you want parents to see live video. This is frequently the biggest surprise, because the parent app doesn’t include it.
• Billing / tuition — card and ACH processing, autopay, late fees. Sometimes bundled with the parent app, sometimes its own tool.
• Compliance / reporting — often still paper, occasionally a separate licensing-prep tool.

Each of these is a real cost. The problem isn’t any single one — it’s that they’re sold separately, by different companies, with no integration between them. You pay four subscriptions, manage four logins, and reconcile four sets of data by hand.

The pricing models to understand (and watch)

Whatever vendor you look at, the price is built from a few levers. Know them and you can’t be surprised:

• Per-child pricing. Many tools charge per enrolled child. It looks small per head, but it scales with your roster — a number that’s easy to underestimate at signup and uncomfortable to see at 120 kids.
• Per-camera or per-location fees. Camera services almost always charge per camera per month. Six cameras at a per-cam rate adds up fast, and it’s usually a separate invoice from the parent app.
• Storage / retention. Video has to live somewhere. Ask how long recordings are kept and whether longer retention costs extra — “unlimited” rarely is.
• Onboarding and hardware. One-time setup, devices, or installation. Fine as long as it’s disclosed up front.
• The exit cost. This one’s invisible until you leave. Some platforms make cancellation deliberately hard — the “schedule a phone call to cancel” pattern shows up repeatedly in director reviews. Ask before you sign, not after.

What “one bill” actually changes

We built TinyGuard around a single subscription specifically because the four-vendor stack is exhausting and opaque. The model is a flat base, a modest per-child rate, and a flat per-camera rate — one invoice that covers the parent video, the care logging, the billing, and the compliance export together.

And since most vendors make you book a demo to learn a price, here are ours, in public: $99/mo per facility + $2.50 per child + a fixed price per camera set by the retention you pick — 7-day storage $7/cam, 30-day $12/cam, 60-day $20/cam, 365-day $69/cam, per month. No metered overages, ever. Hardware is a $299 one-time kit. (Camera-law states like Minnesota set a minimum retention that can raise a camera’s tier.)

What that comes to in practice:

That’s the whole formula — $99 + children × $2.50 + cameras × their retention rate. The pricing calculator does the math for your exact counts.

I’m still not going to quote a competitor’s monthly figure here, because it’ll be stale by the time you read it — and most of them don’t publish one anyway, which tells you something. The structural point is the part that lasts: a parent app plus a separate camera service is two subscriptions, two bills, and two contracts. Consolidating them is usually at or below what the two cost separately — and it’s one number you can actually predict.

How to compare offers without getting burned

When you’re evaluating any childcare platform — us included — ask these five questions and write down the answers:

1. What’s the all-in monthly cost for my child count and my camera count? (Not the headline base price.)
2. Are cameras included, or a separate vendor and bill?
3. How long are recordings retained, and does longer cost more?
4. What are the per-child and per-camera rates, and how do they scale as I grow?
5. How do I cancel — in-app, or do I have to call?

If a vendor can’t answer those in plain numbers, that’s information too.

The bottom line

“Childcare software cost” isn’t one number — it’s the sum of however many tools you’re forced to run. The cheapest-looking parent app can become the most expensive stack once you add cameras, billing, and the time your staff spends switching between them. Price the whole job, not the first line item.

If you want to see what one consolidated bill looks like for your center, the pricing calculator does the math, or book a 15-minute demo and I’ll walk you through it.

— Del Peck Founder, TinyGuard

TinyGuard puts cameras, care logging, billing, and compliance on one on-site box. Book a 15-minute demo or see the pricing.