Deployment model drives total cost more than licence price does. A system installed on your premises carries hosting, backup, patching and an owner; a hosted system carries a subscription and removes those. SchoolDeck is hosted only, on Google Cloud in Mumbai, with data resident in India.
Schools comparing an on-premise option with a hosted one usually compare a licence fee against a subscription and conclude that the licence is cheaper. Over five years it frequently is not, and the difference is entirely in the lines that do not appear on either quotation.
The right-hand column below is what to ask them, not what we claim about them. We publish SchoolDeck and do not track other vendors’ current feature sets; anything material should be verified with the vendor directly.
If you need software on your own premises for a policy reason, we cannot meet that and you should shortlist products that can. If you do not, compare the five-year total — subscription against licence plus server, backups, patching and the person who owns it — rather than the headline figure.
| What you are comparing | TurtleDock | Vidyalaya |
|---|---|---|
| Deployment | Hosted only — Google Cloud, Mumbai. No on-premise option | Ask which models they support, and what each costs |
| Data residency | India, stated in the contract | Ask where data physically sits, and whether it is contractual |
| Who patches it | We do, continuously. Not your problem | Ask who applies security updates on premise, and how often |
| Backups | Ours, tested by restoring | Ask when the backup was last restored from, not whether it exists |
| Five-year cost | Subscription, predictable, implementation included | Ask for licence plus server, backup, patching and staff time |
| Holding your own deployment | Not possible with us | Ask — if this is a requirement, it decides the whole evaluation |
None of these are hypothetical; they are what schools discover in year two.
We lose these fairly and would rather say so.
Phrased the way they arrive, answered so each one stands on its own.
On Google Cloud in Mumbai, with data resident in India, stated contractually. Encryption is applied in transit and at rest, with field-level protection for identifiers such as Aadhaar and bank details.
Complete structured export on demand, available as a button rather than a request, plus read-only access for a defined period after termination. Your data is readable without us.
Checked by the Implementations desk on 7 September 2026. Corrections go in the page, dated, rather than quietly.
Pricing is on the page, in the open, with the counting rule written next to it. Nobody has to book a call to find out what it costs.
See pricingForty minutes with an implementation engineer — your classes, your fee heads, your grading scheme, entered as we go. No slides, no sample school.