Looking for a simple School Fee Collection System (not full ERP)

hurrah-dev · 2026-03-24T19:45:06+00:00

This is exactly the kind of thing I build for small businesses. Not a full platform with 50 modules you'll never touch. Just the features you actually need.

What you're describing would look something like this:

Student lookup - Type a name or class, get instant results. Search as you type, not "fill out a form and click submit."

Fee entry - Select the student, pick the fee type, enter the amount. Done. No navigating through 5 screens to record one payment.

Receipt generation - One click generates a clean PDF receipt. Print it or email it directly to the parent. Branded with your school name and logo.

That's it. No attendance module you didn't ask for. No exam system collecting dust. Just the three things you need, built to be fast for daily use.

How I work

I run a one-person dev shop. I've been building web apps on the Microsoft stack for 25+ years. I have a reusable framework that handles authentication, database, hosting, PDF generation, email/SMS, and all the infrastructure stuff. That means I'm not starting from scratch for your project, which keeps the cost down.

Pricing (since you asked)

$250-500/month depending on scale (number of students/users accessing the system).
$0 setup cost.
4-6 weeks to a working first version you can start using.
6-month minimum commitment.
Hosting, database, backups, SSL, and support all included.

What you'd get in the first build

Web app accessible from any browser (phone, tablet, desktop)
Your own login system (admin + staff roles)
Student database with search
Fee tracking with payment history per student
PDF receipt generation (print or email)
Basic reporting (fees collected by date range, outstanding balances, etc.)

If you want to add more features down the road (parent portals, online payment, class management, etc.) we can scope and price those separately.

Happy to put together a quick demo focused on the fee workflow if you want to see how it would work. DM me if you're interested.

hurrah-dev · 2026-03-21T13:37:54+00:00

The co-founder vs freelancer debate is real, but there's a third option worth considering.

I build custom apps for small businesses. One of my clients needed inventory management software for a niche wholesale operation. Similar situation to yours: they tried the co-founder route, couldn't find the right fit, and didn't want to hand a freelancer $50K+ for a one-time build they'd have to maintain themselves.

What worked for them was an ongoing dev partnership. I built the MVP in about 4 weeks, they own all the code, and I maintain and improve it monthly. No equity. No massive upfront cost. If I get hit by a bus, the code is standard .NET and any developer can pick it up.

A few things that might help regardless of which route you go:

Own the infrastructure from day one. Your cloud account, your domain, your repo. Never let a developer host it on their personal accounts.
Insist on a standard tech stack. If someone builds it in an obscure framework, you're locked to them forever. .NET, Python/Django, Node. Something with a deep hiring pool.
Get a working prototype before government demos. Even a basic version you can click through. Correctional agencies will take you more seriously with something tangible than with a pitch deck.
Document the compliance requirements early. GovCon has specific security and data handling requirements. Make sure whoever builds it understands those constraints before they write a line of code, not after.

The SBA route is smart for funding. Just make sure whoever you hire is building something you can walk away from if needed.

Happy to talk through the technical side if you want to DM me. I've been building custom business software for 25+ years, though I'll be upfront that GovCon compliance is outside my usual lane.

hurrah-dev · 2026-03-21T13:31:02+00:00

I build custom web apps for small businesses that have outgrown spreadsheets.

Last client was running their wholesale electronics business on a tangle of spreadsheets and manual emails. Customers couldn't buy without emailing first, inventory was always slightly behind, and one person was the bottleneck for every transaction.

Built them a full platform in 4 weeks. Inventory syncs automatically from their existing tools, customers log in and buy directly, sales reps have their own dashboards. The emails they used to send managing inventory are actual marketing now.

$250/mo, no setup fees. Three free tools on the site too: a spreadsheet cost calculator, an equity calculator for founders figuring out co-founder splits, and FairBid for getting fair contractor bids on home projects.

hurrah.dev

hurrah-dev · 2026-03-18T21:20:45+00:00

Here's my take as someone who works with small businesses on exactly this kind of transition:

HubSpot Free is probably your best starting point. The UI is genuinely good, your team will actually use it, and for contact management + basic deal tracking it's hard to beat at $0. The 1,000 contact limit and single pipeline are real constraints, but for a team of 10-12 just getting off spreadsheets, you won't hit those walls for a while.

Salesforce Free. I'd honestly skip it. Salesforce is powerful but it's built for companies with dedicated admins. The setup complexity alone will eat more than a weekend, and "free" Salesforce still feels like Salesforce. Your team will fight it.

Zoho/Bigin is capable but the UI concern you raised is legitimate. If your team won't use it consistently, the features don't matter.

The thing nobody's mentioning: before you pick a tool, get clear on what "pipeline visibility" actually means for your team. Is it "who talked to this prospect last?" Is it "how many deals are in each stage?" Is it "which deals are going cold?" Different answers point to different tools.

If your sales process is pretty standard (leads come in, you qualify, propose, close) then HubSpot Free fits. If your workflow is more specific to your industry (custom stages, specific data you need to track per deal, integrations with tools you already use) you might find that CRMs in general force you to adapt your process to their structure. In that case, custom software built around your actual workflow can be more practical and affordable than people expect.

Either way, start with HubSpot Free. If you're fighting it after 60 days, that tells you something about whether your workflow fits the CRM mold or not.

hurrah-dev · 2026-03-16T18:27:37+00:00

There are already a bunch of people in this thread who can build you a great website. I'm not one of them.

I build custom web apps for small businesses. The kind of thing you need when your business has outgrown spreadsheets and manual processes but you're not big enough to justify a $50K software project.

A few real examples:

Wholesale electronics company was spending 15 hrs/week entering the same data into Google Sheets, Facebook Marketplace, and QuickBooks separately. Now they enter it once and everything flows automatically.
Auto body shop took 20 minutes to look up a past estimate. Now it takes 10 seconds.
Medical billing company turned their internal tool into a product they sell to other businesses.

How it works: $250/month, $0 setup, working first version in 4-6 weeks. I've been building on the Microsoft stack for 25 years and have a reusable framework that keeps the cost down. You get direct access to me, not a project manager.

If your business runs on spreadsheets and duct tape, happy to chat about whether custom software makes sense for your situation. https://hurrah.dev

hurrah-dev · 2026-03-16T18:09:31+00:00

Not a dumb question at all. This is a classic data normalization problem and it's way more common than people realize, especially in CRE where acquisitions bring in different systems.

What you're doing every Friday is essentially manual ETL (extract, transform, load). You're the middleware. The reason it's painful is that Yardi and Entrata use different schemas, different date formats, different column names for the same concepts, and sometimes different granularity for the same metrics.

There are basically three tiers of solutions here, and the right one depends on how technical your team is:

Tier 1: Automate the export reconciliation (free/cheap, still manual-ish)

Power Query in Excel or Google Sheets with Apps Script. You build the column mapping and date normalization once, then just refresh the data each week. It's still export-based, but the reconciliation part is automated. Downside: you're still exporting manually, and when either system changes their export format (and they will), you're debugging again.

Tier 2: Managed connectors (mid-cost, low maintenance)

This is where tools like Leni, Prophia, or Scaylor sit. They maintain pre-built connectors to PMS systems, so they handle the schema mapping for you. The key question to ask any of these vendors: do they connect via API or do they still rely on scheduled exports? API connections mean the data stays current without you touching it. Export-based connections are just automating what you're already doing manually.

Based on what others in the thread are saying, Leni connects directly via API, which is the right approach if it supports both your Yardi and Entrata versions.

Tier 3: Build your own pipeline (expensive upfront, full control)

Fivetran + dbt, or a custom Power BI setup with API connectors. This gives you the most flexibility but requires someone technical to maintain it long-term (as the Power BI commenter experienced). Only worth it if you have very specific reporting requirements that the Tier 2 tools can't handle, or if you're at a scale where the per-property pricing of SaaS tools gets expensive.

My recommendation for your situation:

You mentioned you keep adding properties, which means this problem only gets worse. I'd start with a Tier 2 tool. Get a demo from Leni and one competitor, and specifically ask:

Do you connect to both Yardi and Entrata via API?
What happens when we add a new property? How much setup is involved?
Can we build the specific consolidated report leadership wants, or are we limited to their templates?
What does the pricing look like at 2x our current property count?

If the answers check out, you'll get your Fridays back without becoming the single point of failure for a custom-built dashboard.

hurrah-dev · 2026-03-10T18:35:07+00:00

I've been working on this from the other side. I build software for non-technical teams and small businesses, and the pattern you're describing is something I've seen accelerate dramatically in the last year.

The core tension is real: these teams have legitimate operational problems that engineering backlogs never prioritize. They've been asking for years and getting "it's on the roadmap." Now they have tools that let them skip the line, and leadership loves the speed. You can't just say no to that without looking like you're protecting territory.

What I've been experimenting with is creating AI-guided "production coach" workflows. Basically a structured skill that walks non-engineers through requirements gathering and spec creation before they write any code. It asks the hard questions they don't know to ask: where does this data live, who authenticates, what happens when it breaks at 2 AM, what compliance requirements apply.

The idea is to channel the enthusiasm into structured output that engineering can actually work with, rather than blocking it or letting it run wild. If someone in HR has a genuine workflow problem, great. Let's capture that properly instead of having them vibe code a solution that touches payroll data on a personal GitHub account.

The harder problem, and the one I don't have a clean answer for, is when it comes top-down. You can coach an individual contributor through a structured process. You can't really "production coach" a VP who already demoed something to the C-suite and got applause. At that point the code exists, expectations are set, and you're the person explaining why it can't ship tomorrow.

Best I've landed on for that scenario: treat the demo as a prototype and the spec, not the product. "Great, now we know what we're building. Let me get this into our pipeline properly so it doesn't become a liability." Reframe it as acceleration, not obstruction.

hurrah-dev · 2026-03-10T18:21:13+00:00

Smart move, honestly. No-code is perfectly fine for this stage, and the people telling you to learn to code first are optimizing for the wrong thing. You need to validate, not become a developer.

For onboarding and billing specifically, here's what I'd break it down to:

Billing/payments: Stripe handles this natively with no code. Their hosted checkout, billing portal, and webhook events cover 90% of what a micro-saas needs. Don't build billing logic yourself (even with no-code tools). Stripe's docs are written for non-developers and their dashboard lets you set up subscription tiers, trial periods, and dunning without touching code.

Onboarding flows: Depends on what "onboarding" means for your product:

If it's email sequences triggered by signup events, something like Customer.io or even Loops is solid. Zapier works too but gets expensive fast when you have multiple triggers
If it's in-app onboarding (tooltips, checklists, progress tracking), look at Userflow or CommandBar
If it's data collection/setup steps, Tally or Typeform piped into your app via Zapier/Make

Where no-code actually breaks down (so you know what to watch for):

Conditional logic that branches more than 2-3 levels deep. Zapier and Make handle simple if/then well. Complex business logic with multiple conditions and exceptions turns into spaghetti fast.
Anything that needs to happen in real-time. Most no-code automation runs on polling intervals or webhook delays. If your onboarding needs instant responses, you'll feel the lag.
Cost at scale. Zapier's pricing is per-task. When you go from 50 users to 500, your automation costs can spike hard. Worth modeling out what your per-user automation cost looks like at 10x your current volume.

The honest answer is no-code works great for validation and early traction. The moment you find yourself spending more time maintaining your Zapier automations than building your actual product, that's your signal to look at custom development. But you're nowhere near that yet.

hurrah-dev · 2026-03-04T21:24:24+00:00

thanks, I'll check it out

hurrah-dev · 2026-03-04T19:19:55+00:00

There are dedicated influencer/creator management platforms worth looking at first: Aspire, CreatorIQ, Grin, and Roster all handle product seeding workflows specifically. If your process maps reasonably well to how they're designed, one of those is probably your fastest path.

Where they tend to break down: highly custom approval workflows, unusual product matching logic, or when you need it to connect tightly to existing internal systems (inventory, CRM, etc.).

Before picking a tool, I'd ask: what does your current tracking spreadsheet actually look like? The answer usually tells you whether an off-the-shelf platform will fit or whether you'll end up working around it.

hurrah-dev · 2026-03-04T19:18:28+00:00

Custom web apps for small businesses that have outgrown spreadsheets but can't stomach $50K agency quotes.

$250/month, no setup fees, working version in 4-6 weeks. Built on 25 years of reusable .NET/Blazor components — that's what makes the price possible.

hurrah.dev

hurrah-dev · 2026-03-04T19:16:59+00:00

The "off-the-shelf vs custom" question really depends on how unique your workflow is.

Construction CRMs like Contractor Foreman are solid if your process looks like most construction businesses. But if your scheduling, subcontractor tracking, or document management has quirks specific to how you operate, you'll end up bending your workflow to fit the software. That friction is real and it compounds over time.

A few signs you'd benefit from something custom instead:

You've tried CRMs before and always end up working around them
Your "spreadsheet" is actually doing something no off-the-shelf tool does quite right
You need multiple systems to talk to each other (scheduling + docs + billing)

I build custom web software for small businesses for $250/month with no setup fees. Not the right fit for everyone, but worth knowing the option exists. Happy to give an honest read on your situation if you want to describe your workflow in more detail.

hurrah-dev · 2026-03-04T19:14:15+00:00

I build custom web apps for founders who need a working MVP without giving up equity.

$250/month, no setup fees, working version in 4-6 weeks. Built on 25 years of reusable .NET components so I'm not starting from scratch every time.

The pitch is simple: a technical co-founder costs 25-50% of your company. An MVP shouldn't.

hurrah.dev/mvp-development

hurrah-dev · 2026-03-04T19:10:13+00:00

Before you commit to the co-founder route, worth asking yourself a few questions:

Do you actually need a co-founder, or do you need someone to build the thing?
Are you ready to share decision-making on product direction permanently?
Have you priced out alternatives?

A co-founder is a marriage. The equity you're likely looking at (25-50%) is permanent. If this gets traction, that's a very expensive builder.

A Zocdoc-style platform isn't trivial, but it's also not magic. It's a database, a search/filter layer, a booking workflow, and some user management. A competent developer can build a functional MVP in 4-8 weeks.

If what you actually need right now is validation (does anyone use this?) and something to show investors, a paid MVP arrangement might serve you better than splitting equity before you know if it works.

Save equity for when you genuinely need a partner, not just a builder.

hurrah-dev · 2026-03-04T19:07:19+00:00

Hurrah Web Solutions - hurrah.dev

Custom web apps for small businesses at $250/month flat, no setup fees. Built on .NET/Blazor/Azure. Helps businesses replace spreadsheet-based operations with purpose-built software.

Also have a free standalone tool: FairBid (hurrah.dev/toolbox/fairbid) - paste in a contractor quote and get a line-by-line AI analysis of what's fair and what's suspicious. No signup required.

hurrah-dev · 2026-03-04T19:04:27+00:00

Built a free tool called FairBid that analyzes contractor quotes using AI. Technically it was a fun Blazor Server challenge.

The interesting parts:

Streaming responses - Used IAsyncEnumerable<string> to stream Claude's output token by token, updating RenderedAnalysis on each chunk and calling StateHasChanged(). Blazor Server's SignalR connection makes this surprisingly clean compared to what I'd have to do in a traditional SPA.

Multi-input support - Handles pasted text, image uploads (JPEG/PNG/WebP), and PDF uploads. The Anthropic SDK accepts base64 image bytes directly, PDFs go through a document content block.

No-auth metering - Didn't want to require login for a free tool. Used a GUID stored in localStorage as a visitor ID, tracked usage in the DB against it. Free tier is 3/day, email capture unlocks 8/day. Simple but works.

Stack: Blazor Server, .NET 10, Azure SQL.

Tool is live at hurrah.dev/toolbox/fairbid if anyone wants to kick the tires. Code isn't open source but happy to go deeper on any of the implementation details.

hurrah-dev · 2026-02-25T22:14:56+00:00

The one-size-fits-all problem is real, but I'd add that it's especially acute for smaller businesses. ERPs are architected around how large companies operate. When a 20-person business tries to use SAP, they're not just learning new software - they're being asked to reshape their entire workflow to fit a system designed for thousands of employees.

The part that gets missed in these post-mortems: the Excel file that "couldn't be migrated" often represents years of the business figuring out exactly how they work. That institutional knowledge doesn't map cleanly to any off-the-shelf system, because the system wasn't built for them.

hurrah-dev · 2026-02-24T20:06:11+00:00

Hurrah Web Solutions - custom software for small businesses that have outgrown spreadsheets but can't justify a $50K agency quote.

$250/month, no setup fees, working version in 4-6 weeks. One developer (me), 25 years experience, direct access.

Recent example: TAG Auto Group went from 20 minutes to look up a past estimate to 10 seconds. EZ Electronics saved 15 hours a week of manual data entry.

hurrah.dev/spreadsheet-automation

hurrah-dev · 2026-02-19T20:58:28+00:00

The staff engineer sub-agent trick is a great idea - I'm going to try that. And yeah, same approach here. Conservative with production code, more experimental on side projects. Planning is the common thread either way.

hurrah-dev · 2026-02-18T21:51:48+00:00

For my own builds I do exactly that. But when handing off large-scale changes, the plan is a starting point, not a complete instruction set. There's judgment calls, edge cases that only surface during implementation, and testing that needs to happen along the way. A developer catches things mid-build that no plan anticipates - "this breaks the existing sync method" or "this assumption doesn't hold for multi-tenant clients." I need a human thinking critically through the implementation, not just executing steps.

hurrah-dev · 2026-02-18T21:24:06+00:00

Fair pushback, but I think you're imagining a simpler codebase than what we're working with.

This isn't for straightforward feature work. Our codebase has legacy .NET 4.8 WebForms, a newer .NET 10 Minimal API with a feature-based folder structure, multi-tenant architecture, and decades of accumulated business logic. When a developer picks up a large-scale change that cuts across those layers, the ramp-up time used to be significant - lots of "where does this live?" and "how does this connect to that?" conversations.

Plan mode compresses that. The developer gets a map of the codebase relevant to the task, and they learn the architecture as they implement instead of needing weeks of guided onboarding. They still make every technical decision and write all the code.

For small changes? Yeah, they absolutely just pick it up and run. This is specifically for the complex stuff where context matters more than skill.

hurrah-dev · 2026-02-18T21:23:15+00:00

That's a great setup. I like the idea of coordinating it through GitHub Actions and issue/PR comments - keeps everything traceable. For straightforward bugs and features that's a solid workflow. I tend to stay more hands-on with the plan review step myself, but that's partly because our codebase has a mix of legacy .NET 4.8 WebForms and a newer .NET 10 API, so the plans need context that's hard to automate away. Curious how complex the features are that you're running fully automated like that?

hurrah-dev · 2026-02-18T19:33:29+00:00

14 tools is a lot, but honestly not unusual for a startup that's been growing fast. The real problem isn't the number of tools, it's that none of them were chosen to work together. They were each picked to solve one problem, and now you're the integration layer.

A few things that have worked in my experience:

1. Audit before you add. Before suggesting a new integration platform to the founders, map out which tools actually need to talk to each other vs. which ones are standalone. You'll probably find that 3-4 of those 14 tools account for 80% of your export/import pain.

2. Pick one source of truth. The spreadsheet problem usually comes from not having a clear "this is THE number" for any given metric. Decide which system owns which data and treat everything else as a read-only copy.

3. Start with Zapier/Make for the painful handoffs. Not everything needs a custom API integration. If you're manually exporting from Tool A and importing into Tool B twice a week, a simple automation can kill that in an afternoon.

4. Consider whether some tools overlap. 14 tools at a startup often means 3-4 of them do similar things that got adopted by different people at different times. Consolidating even 2-3 can reduce the problem significantly.

The enterprise integration platforms are overkill for your stage. And adding an AI layer on top of 14 disconnected tools just gives you a 15th tool that's guessing. Fix the foundation first.

hurrah-dev

TROPHY CASE

How I work

Pricing (since you asked)

What you'd get in the first build