Plain answers, including the awkward ones.

A perpetual licence does not expire. You buy it once for your organisation, and the software you licensed keeps working whether or not you renew anything afterwards.

The licence is for a named organisation and a band of counted schools. Maintenance and hosting are separate from it. This is a summary of the offer. The licence agreement, when published, is what binds.

Keystone does not stop working because maintenance is not renewed. You keep your data and your licensed software, and no subscription starts.

For a paid licence, maintenance provides feature releases, standard support and the supported upgrade path, so those are what stop. We make High and Critical security fixes available for supported Keystone release lines regardless of maintenance status. The final definitions will be in the maintenance terms.

No. Keystone does not charge per technician, per requester or per ticket. The licence gives you unlimited users, agents and tickets within your licensed organisation. The price depends on how many schools you have.

Each school in your organisation counts once towards the licence tier, unless a Micro School allowance applies to it. The licence builder takes the list of schools, the trust or federation each one belongs to, and each school's pupil number, from the Department for Education's Get Information about Schools register.

We use the latest pupil figure the register publishes for a school, and show its date. Where a school is not on the register, has no published figure, or has a figure there is a specific reason to doubt, it is marked as needing confirmation. It counts until it has been confirmed.

A Micro School is a school with fewer than 100 pupils. A school with 99 pupils is one. A school with 100 is not.

A school standing alone with fewer than 100 pupils qualifies for the KeystoneIT perpetual licence at £0. In a larger organisation, the first 3 Micro Schools do not count towards the licence tier, and any further ones count in the usual way.

The rule rests on each school's published pupil figure and the date of that figure. It is our commercial rule, not a determination by the Department for Education.

A Micro MAT is an academy trust with no more than 3 schools, every one with fewer than 100 pupils. A Micro Group is the same for a federation, or for another single organisation that runs its schools. Either pays £0 for the KeystoneIT perpetual licence. It is the full product.

The schools have to be one organisation. Where the register shows that they are, the licence builder applies the Micro licence. Where it does not, we can calculate an indicative price, but we'll confirm the organisation relationship before issuing a licence.

If the organisation grows out of the Micro terms, the usual one-off difference between tiers applies.

Micro organisations receive the software and software maintenance at no charge. Commercial support and Keystone Managed are optional paid services.

The licence is the perpetual KeystoneIT licence for the full product. Software maintenance for a Micro licence is £0 for as long as the organisation still qualifies. It covers eligible product updates for supported release lines and the supported upgrade path. We make High and Critical security fixes available for supported Keystone release lines as well.

A Micro licence does not include commercial support, managed hosting, bespoke onboarding, priority support or consultancy. No price is published yet for commercial support or for Keystone Managed, which is planned.

Yes. The price list starts at one school, so a single school is priced in the first tier: 1–3 schools, £2,995 excluding VAT. A school standing alone with fewer than 100 pupils qualifies for the Micro School licence at £0.

A school that is part of an academy trust or a federation is normally licensed with the rest of it. KeystoneIT is in development, so today a quote is for planning and budgeting. It is not an order.

Trust licensing normally covers the whole Trust, not a selection of its academies. If you choose only some of the academies the register lists for your Trust, the licence builder still shows a price, and the quote says that we need to confirm the arrangement with you before a licence is issued.

There can be good reasons for an exception, such as academies that are joining or leaving. Tell us and we will work it out with you.

Self-hosted means you run Keystone on infrastructure you control. Your licence includes the right to do that. Keystone Managed will be an optional recurring hosting and operations service, in which Alresford hosts and operates your installation. It is planned and is not available yet. The software licence remains perpetual.

It is the same product either way, and you can move from one to the other without buying the software again. Keystone Managed is intended to include software maintenance, so a Keystone Managed customer would not also pay the optional maintenance charge. Keystone Managed pricing is not published yet. We will quote for it separately.

We cannot say yet. Keystone is being designed for managed and self-hosted deployment. Supported self-hosting platforms will be published as qualification completes.

Until then we name no operating system or virtualisation platform as supported, and nobody can install Keystone today.

No. Each organisation has its own installation. Keystone is not a shared multi-tenant service, whether you run it or we do.

Keystone is developed by Alresford Systems Ltd, a company registered in England and Wales. It is a new company, incorporated in January 2026. The About page has the company details.

No school or Trust runs Keystone yet, so this site has no customer names, logos or testimonials.

A perpetual licence does not expire, so the software you have licensed keeps working.

The licence is intended to include source-code continuity rights. The terms are being written; nothing here is a legal promise.