What Is a "PTM Round," and How Should a School Price Parent-Teacher Meetings?

Most software a school buys is priced per seat, per month, whether it's used that month or not. Parent-teacher meetings don't happen every month — most schools run them once a term, sometimes less. A monthly subscription for something used four times a year is a bad match, and it's the reason PTM Live is priced around a different unit entirely: a round.

What a round actually is

A round is a 30-day window during which every teacher at a school can publish availability and every parent can book a time. It opens when a school decides to run its PTMs, and it closes on its own 30 days later — there's nothing to remember to cancel, and nothing keeps charging in between rounds. A school running meetings once a term pays for roughly three rounds a year; a school running them more often pays for however many it actually uses.

Why this is one flat fee, not a per-teacher charge

A round covers the whole school — every teacher, every student, every feature — for one flat price sized to the school's overall size, not multiplied by headcount. A school with twenty teachers and a school with five pay a different flat amount for their size, but neither pays more for adding another teacher mid-round. That matters in practice: a school shouldn't have to think twice about whether a new teacher is "worth" adding to the scheduling system.

How this compares to what a school currently spends

The honest comparison isn't against a free spreadsheet — it's against the staff time currently spent coordinating PTM day by hand: manually assigning slots, chasing reminders, re-announcing changes. That time has a real cost even when no line item captures it. A flat per-round fee is easy to budget against precisely because it's tied to an event a school already schedules deliberately, not a recurring subscription running quietly in the background whether or not anything happens that month.

Every school gets a 7-day free trial with full access before paying anything — enough to run one actual round and see whether it fits. See the full feature and pricing overview for current per-round pricing by school size.