Today, for the first time, Remind introduced a maximum number of classes—and a maximum number of people per class—available with a free account. Although most teachers using our platform won’t encounter these limits, we know they may represent a significant change in the Remind experience for some of those who do. With this in mind, I wanted to share some more information about why we’ve made this decision and what it means for Remind going forward.
When Remind was founded in 2011, our user base was so small that Brett and David, our founders, knew most of the teachers using the platform. Now, almost a decade later, we’re still working toward our vision of helping every student succeed. But we’re doing it on a much larger scale: To date, billions of messages have been delivered by the millions of educators, parents, and students who use Remind to communicate with each other every day.
As Remind has grown, we’ve had to think about how to build a sustainable business so we can continue supporting these classrooms and communities for a long, long time. While individual Remind accounts are free to use, they take millions of dollars every year to support—and being deliberate about class size and number is one way to ensure that we can continue doing so.
The size of free accounts is one of the many costs that go into supporting our platform. Another is the cost of text messaging, which is why we’re so grateful that you made your voices heard this January to keep our SMS fees from increasing. And while other challenges may arise in the future, please know that we continue to be committed to offering a free version of Remind for educators to use.
If you have more than 10 classes or 150 participants in a class, different options are available depending on your role and the size of your group. For teachers, cleaning up your classes for the upcoming school year will take just a few minutes. Or, if you’re an administrator for a larger educational group, we’ve been hard at work at making Remind even better suited for your needs: Whether you’re communicating across a school, an extracurricular group, or a community organization, the Remind plan includes higher class, participant, and character limits for everyone affiliated. You’ll also have access to more oversight, advanced controls, and community engagement statistics.
As always, thank you for coming along on this journey with us over the years. We’ve been working on some other exciting new developments as we expand and explore new ways to help students succeed, so stay tuned for more details in the coming months—we’re looking forward to sharing them with you very soon.
