Should you build your own Educamos?
School management and family communication platform used by K-12 schools, mostly in Spain and Latin America, covering grades, attendance, timetables and messaging.
This is not an app you own, it is the system of record your school runs on. The grades, attendance marks, timetables and official report cards live on the school's tenant, entered by teachers you do not employ, under student data rules you do not control. A personal replacement would have nothing authoritative to read from: there is no public API you can point at, and scraping a minor's school portal is a bad idea on several axes at once. Even if you rebuilt the parent-facing screens perfectly, the moment a teacher posts a notice it would appear in Educamos and not in your build. The honest DIY here is a private tracker that sits beside it, not a replacement for it.
ENOriginal research content in English. Original prompt preserved in English.
Build a local-only family school tracker called Boletin. Single user, no accounts, no cloud.
Stack, no substitutions:
- Node 20, TypeScript, Fastify for the server
- SQLite via better-sqlite3, file at ./data/boletin.db, schema created on first run
- Server-rendered HTML with a single Pico.css CDN link, plus a little vanilla JS. No React, no build step beyond tsc.
Data model:
- child: id, name, school_year
- subject: id, child_id, name, teacher_name (optional), weight (optional)
- grade: id, subject_id, date, label, score, max_score, notes
- attendance: id, child_id, date, status (present, absent, late, excused), notes
- note: id, child_id, date, source (teacher, school, me), title, body, pinned boolean
- homework: id, subject_id, due_date, title, done boolean
Features, in scope:
- Child switcher in the header.
- Dashboard per child: current average per subject (weighted if weights set), homework due in the next 7 days, last 5 notes, absence count this term.
- Forms to add and edit every entity. Fast keyboard entry matters more than looks: one page per entity type with an inline add row at the top.
- Subject detail page with a plain SVG line chart of grades over time, no chart library.
- A weekly summary page rendered from the last 7 days of data, with a copy-to-clipboard plain text version.
- CSV import for grades: columns subject,date,label,score,max_score. Show a preview and a row count before committing.
- Export everything to JSON at /export, and a button that copies the SQLite file to ./backups with a timestamp.
Explicitly out of scope, do not attempt:
- Any connection to a school platform, no scraping, no login automation, no unofficial APIs
- Multi-user, invites, or messaging
- Push notifications, email, telemetry, analytics
Details:
- npm start runs the server on PORT from .env, default 3000. Commit .env.example only.
- Seed script with one fictional child and two subjects so the UI is not empty on first run.
- README: what this is, what it is not, and one blunt line saying grades must be typed in by hand because the school's system is the source of truth.The prompt opens pre-filled in your agent. Review it before running. · this prompt is generated from the build plan · improve it via PR
What would building your own look like?
A local family dashboard where you manually log grades, homework and school notices per child and get a simple trend view plus a weekly summary.
What you will need
- Node and a local SQLite file
- Manual entry, or copy-paste from whatever the school actually sends you
- Nothing else, no school system access
Nobody chooses Educamos as a consumer. The school buys it because it wires together academic records, attendance, timetabling, family communication and often billing into one tenant that the administration and the teaching staff both live in, with student data handling that a school's legal obligations require somebody to be accountable for. Parents pay in attention, not money, and use it because that is where the grades appear. Ripping it out means retraining a whole staff and migrating years of academic records, which is exactly the kind of project schools do once a decade at most.
xAuthoritative data: teachers enter grades and attendance in Educamos, not in your app
xTwo-way messaging with teachers and the school office
xOfficial documents: report cards, absence justifications, enrolment and billing flows
xTimetable, room and substitution updates that come from the school's own scheduling
xEveryone else on it: the school, other parents, the administration staff
Nothing worth pointing at. That’s why the prompt exists.
How much does Educamos cost?
No public price. Check the official site.
Saved to My list. You will see a notice on this site when the price changes.
You complete the purchase on Educamos’s site. Vibe Radar does not handle payments.
Is it cheaper to build or buy Educamos?
Adjust the numbers: hours to build, your hourly rate, running costs and the subscription price.
Over 24 months, subscribing is cheaper.
Starting hours estimated from the analysis (one sitting). Does not price what you give up (support, integrations, security).
Can I rebuild Educamos?
Not really. Educamos’s value is not the code: The moat is that the school, not you, owns the data and the staff who type it in. See the honest breakdown above.
How much does Educamos cost?
Educamos’s pricing is usage-based or varies by plan · Official site shows only a region selector and contact link, with no public prices..
What do I lose by replacing Educamos?
Honestly: Authoritative data: teachers enter grades and attendance in Educamos, not in your app; Two-way messaging with teachers and the school office; Official documents: report cards, absence justifications, enrolment and billing flows; Timetable, room and substitution updates that come from the school's own scheduling; Everyone else on it: the school, other parents, the administration staff. If any of those are load-bearing for you, keep paying.
Is there an open-source alternative to Educamos?
No mature open-source alternative worth pointing at, which is exactly why the one-shot prompt on this page exists.