Common questions about the hosted product.

Why Ruff Registrar?

When my family started homeschooling our three boys we joined a couple of co-ops and noticed that, unsurprisingly, the tools we had for managing the co-ops were pretty much the same tools that we had used in the 90s when I was in school: spreadsheets, email, and a lot of manual coordination. Security ran the gamut from "let's just share a Google Doc with everyone's info in it" to "we have a password protected website but the password is shared with everyone and never changes". I thought to myself, "surely there is a better way to do this in 2024." I looked around and found some tools that were trying to solve parts of the problem, but nothing that really felt like it was built for the way co-ops actually operate. So I decided to build it myself, and that's how Ruff Registrar was born.

What is Ruff Registrar?

Growing up in the homeschool movement, I know that things tend to be very fluid. The facilities you have access to can change, and the needs of each organization can vary from year to year. I wanted to build a tool that could provide secure access to room, scheduling and member information for administrators, while making it easy for parents to sign up their kids for courses and keep track of their grades. Very simple. I also wanted to make sure that the tool was built on a solid foundation of security and reliability, and overall provide a first-class experience for an underserved demographic.

The project also has an open source community edition. Hosted plans add managed tenant provisioning, billing, and SaaS-specific operations while keeping the core product grounded in the same codebase.

How is AI used in this product?

Short answer: It's not. Long answer: I have been working in AI for a few years now, and I am very excited about the potential of these technologies, but I also know that they are not a silver bullet for every problem. I want to make sure that if I do use AI in this product, it's because it genuinely adds value and not just because it's trendy.

How does the free trial work?

Free signup creates a 30-day trial without collecting a card up front. If billing is not added before the trial ends, the tenant moves to billing hold until payment is completed.

Do paid plans use Stripe?

Yes. Paid signup and billing recovery use Stripe Checkout. Local development environments still need Stripe keys and price IDs configured before those hosted checkout flows can run.

What is included today?

The current hosted focus is tenant onboarding, admin setup, member and student records, semesters, courses, rooms, role-based access, and Stripe-backed billing.

Can we self-host instead?

Yes. The core product is open source, and self-hosting remains an option for organizations that want direct control over deployment and customization.