charterlottery.com

What It Is

Charter Lottery is a charter school admissions lottery SaaS operated by Visualize Digital. Rather than being a general-purpose form tool, it covers the full workflow from parent applications, eligibility review, weighted lotteries, and waitlists to result notifications and audit trails. It places particular emphasis on fairness, transparency, and auditability, making it suitable for schools that need to explain their lottery process to families, state reviewers, or authorizers.

Core Features and Security

The product provides a parent application portal, online application collection, document upload and verification, encrypted secure random lotteries, priority rules for siblings/residency/staff/alumni and more, waitlist management, seat confirmation, email and SMS notifications, CSV export, and multi-school organization management. Administrators can configure admissions cycles, opening/closing dates, grade-level seats, and priority rules; parents can submit applications and view results. On the security side, the text explicitly mentions AWS hosting, encryption at rest and in transit, role-based access, activity logs, timestamps, user attribution, 7-year audit history, and FERPA-conscious workflows.

Pricing and Business Model

Pricing is relatively clear: the free exploration tier requires no credit card and allows users to create an organization, add unlimited schools, configure cycles, and receive and review applications. The paid Per School plan costs $240 per school per year and includes unlimited applications, the lottery engine, notifications, exports, document verification, and waitlists. Networks with more than 10 schools can choose an enterprise plan, with volume discounts, a dedicated success manager, custom integrations, white labeling, API access, SLA, priority support, and invoice payment. Payments are handled through Stripe, and the terms state that subscription charges are non-refundable once billed.

Pros, Cons, and Who It’s For

Its main strength is its highly focused use case: it can replace spreadsheets that are hard to audit and prone to errors. The lottery process, status history, configuration snapshots, and export records help with compliance explanations, while multi-school and permission-management capabilities suit school networks. The limitations are also clear: it primarily serves U.S. charter schools, so its applicability is narrow; enterprise pricing is not public; and details about the API, SOC 2 or similar certifications, self-hosting, and data residency are not disclosed. It is best suited for single schools or multi-school networks that still manage lotteries in spreadsheets and need a standardized admissions workflow.

Access from China and Alternatives

The text does not provide information on mainland China access, RMB payments, or localization, so its availability should be considered unknown. Since payments depend on Stripe and the compliance context is centered on FERPA and U.S. state-level regulation, its practical value for Chinese schools adopting it directly is limited. For use cases in China, local admissions management systems, low-code/form tools combined with custom lottery workflows, or bespoke development to meet local regulatory and data storage requirements would usually be more appropriate.