Seedling is a flat $40/month for your whole center — unlimited children and staff, no per-child fees, no setup fee.
Free trial
Start free, no credit card required. You get 14 days of full access; after that it's $40/month if you choose to continue (you'll be prompted to subscribe through a secure Stripe checkout).
What's included
Everything: attendance, billing, e-signed agreements, messaging, photos, health & compliance records, and the family portal. E-signatures are included at no extra cost.
Manage or cancel
- No contract — cancel anytime, and you keep access through the period you've already paid for.
- Go to Settings → Subscription and click Manage subscription to open the secure Stripe portal, where you can cancel, update your card, or download invoices yourself.
- Prefer we handle it? Email support@goseedling.com and we'll take care of it.
- Your data stays yours — export it whenever you want.
If a payment fails
Nothing switches off at once, and check-in never stops mid-day. A failed card starts a grace period of 14 days measured from the end of the period you last paid for, while Stripe retries.
| Paid up | During the 14-day grace | After the grace | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Parents checking in at the kiosk | Yes | Yes | No |
| Staff checking children in on the dashboard | Yes | Yes | No |
| Attendance records | Yes | Yes | No |
| Your dashboard, records and reports | Yes | Yes | No |
| Adding or editing children, staff, billing | Yes | Yes | No |
| Daily summary emails to families | Yes | Yes | No |
| Tuition charges to families | Yes | Yes | No |
| Family Link portal for parents | Yes | Yes | Yes |
Check-in survives the whole grace on purpose. A center that cannot release a child to their parent because a card expired is a licensing and safety problem, not a billing reminder — so the front door is the last thing to close.
Everything closes at midnight in your center’s own timezone, never in the middle of a day — the kiosk, staff check-in, attendance, the dashboard, the evening summary emails and tuition charges all cut on the same local-day boundary. That holds however a subscription ends: a trial running out, a cancellation, or a card that finally stops retrying.
While you still have access you are still open, so your families are still billed and still get their daily recap. The moment access ends, so does all of it — one boundary, one answer.
The Family Link portal is the exception in the other direction — parents keep access to their own child’s records, photos and documents regardless of the center’s billing state.
Pay the outstanding invoice at any point in those 14 days and everything returns immediately. There is nothing to restore and nothing to re-enter.
Your data after you leave
Your records are not deleted on a schedule. Children, attendance, documents, messages and billing history have no expiry — that is deliberate, because licensed childcare records must not disappear on a timer. If you come back, they are exactly as you left them.
One exception, and it applies to every center whether or not they have lapsed: photo moments are removed after 24 months. Shared photos are storage-heavy and are not a licensing record, so they age out on a rolling two-year window. Download anything you want to keep before then — and note that 24 months is longer than the period described below, so nothing goes missing while you are away.
If you want your data removed, email support@goseedling.com and ask — we act on a written request, not on a clock.
Two things to know regardless:
- Export before you go. You can export your records at any time, and you should keep your own copies of anything your licensor requires. Seedling is not your system of record.
- The Terms of Service say the same thing. Section 15.3 is the formal version: twelve months of retention after termination, removal only on written request after that, and the twenty-four month window on photo moments. It used to permit deletion thirty days after termination, which was never what we did — the clause was amended to match the practice rather than the practice cut to match the clause.
The $40 is separate from tuition processing
The subscription is what you pay Seedling. When families pay tuition, standard Stripe processing applies plus a small Seedling fee — see Tuition & autopay.