Why Keystone

The case for Keystone, stated plainly.

In development KeystoneIT, the first product, is in development and has not been released.

Eight reasons a school or Trust might choose Keystone, with what is true today beside each one.

Built for schools and trusts, not a business tool relabelled

A Trust is a group of schools with a central team, staff based in each school, and a calendar that stops for half-term. KeystoneIT is designed around that shape, not adapted to it afterwards.

  • A request belongs to a school or to the Trust centrally, and access is granted school by school or centrally.
  • Service targets count time on the Trust’s opening hours, skip closures such as half-term, and pause while you wait for the person who asked.
  • Staff ask for help in two questions. Nobody raising a request is asked to choose a priority, a team or a category.

These are in the evaluation build, which is in independent engineering review and has not been accepted.

Everything in the evaluation build, and everything that is not

One coherent product family on one Platform

Keystone is designed as a family of products. KeystoneIT is the first. Every Keystone product runs on the same shared Platform: one identity, one organisation, one audit foundation. The Platform comes with every product and is never a separate purchase.

The other products are planned. We publish no features, dates or prices for them.

The product family

You own what you buy

KeystoneIT is sold as a perpetual licence. Your perpetual licence does not expire. Keystone does not stop working because maintenance is not renewed: you keep your data and your licensed software, and no subscription starts.

The licence is for a named organisation and a band of counted schools. If the organisation grows past the band, the band is what changes, for a one-off charge. Maintenance and hosting are separate from the licence.

The licence is intended to include source-code continuity rights. The terms are being written; nothing here is a legal promise. The licence agreement, when published, is what binds.

The licensing model in plain English

No per-user tax.

Keystone does not charge per technician, per requester or per ticket. The price depends on how many schools you have.

When the price of a tool follows headcount, every login has a cost, and the sensible response is to ration them. A department shares one account. Only a short list of people may raise a request. A part-time technician goes without a seat. The tool ends up used by fewer people than need it, and work goes round it.

A price that follows the number of schools removes the reason to ration. Unlimited users, agents and tickets within your licensed organisation means you can give everyone a login.

This is an argument about incentives, not a statistic.

Self-hosted or managed, and you can change later

Keystone is being designed for managed and self-hosted deployment. It is the same product either way. Your licence includes the right to run Keystone on your own infrastructure. Keystone Managed, in which Alresford hosts and operates your installation, is planned as an optional recurring service. You can move from managed to self-hosted, or the other way, without buying the software again.

  • Keystone Managed Planned
  • Self-hosted Under qualification

Neither can be installed today. Supported self-hosting platforms will be published as qualification completes. Keystone Managed pricing is not published yet.

Where Keystone runs

Transparent pricing you can work out yourself

The price list is published, and so is the rule for counting schools. The licence builder shows its working line by line, so you can check the figure against the rule without a sales call. The one exception is the largest tier, which we price with you.

Provisional. These prices and rules are provisional until the licence agreement and commercial terms are published. A quote is valid for 30 days.

How pricing works Build your price

Your data stays yours

Each organisation has its own installation and its own databases. Keystone is not a shared service that every customer logs in to. Keystone does not stop working because maintenance is not renewed, and the data stays where it is.

Security and trust

Honest about being new

Alresford Systems is a new company, incorporated in January 2026. No school or Trust runs Keystone yet, so this site has no customer names, logos or testimonials. No external penetration test has been carried out, and we hold no security certifications today.

What we offer instead is a plain account. Every capability on this site carries one of a few fixed status words, and nothing planned is described as shipped. Each stage of Keystone goes through independent engineering review: someone other than its author reviews it before it is accepted. That is an internal engineering control. It is not an external audit, a penetration test or a certification. The current KeystoneIT build has not been accepted.

What exists today Who builds Keystone

Work out your own price.

Find your Trust or your schools, check the list, and see exactly how the licence is worked out.

Build your price Register interest in an evaluation