Notipa is a free, open-source alternative to closed, subscription-based classroom apps. There's no account to buy, no per-pupil fee, and nothing to sell — download it, run it with Docker, and it's yours. Announcements, homework, fee notices, and permission slips, all in one place, on infrastructure your school controls.
No sign-up. No trial. No credit card. Clone the repo and run docker compose up.
A school needs to reach every parent reliably about a mix of urgent and routine things: closures, homework, fee due dates, permission slips. Right now, that runs on whatever's free and already installed on everyone's phone — which usually means one of these.
No structure, no read receipts that mean anything, and important announcements buried under parent chatter on a platform the school doesn't control.
Sent home in a school bag and routinely lost before they ever reach a parent's hands — especially with younger children.
Doesn't scale past a small class size, and there's no record afterward of who actually received what.
A genuine communication and admin tool, not a behaviour-gamification app wearing a communication feature. No payment processing, no gradebook, no bolted-on extras — just the things that replace the Facebook group.
School-wide or class-scoped, with a draft/publish step so nothing reaches families half-written, and read tracking so staff know who's actually seen it.
Posted per class with an optional due date and file attachment — visible to that class's guardians the moment it's saved.
Informational due-date reminders for schools that charge tuition — never payment processing, just a clear record of what's owed, and whether it's been paid or waived.
School-wide or class-scoped, with a real per-student response roster — who's said yes, who's said no, and who hasn't answered yet.
A student can have more than one linked guardian — mother, father, grandparent, or another relative — each with their own account and a primary-contact flag.
One install can host more than one school. Every person's role — admin, teacher, or guardian — is scoped per school, enforced at the data level, not just hidden in the UI.
Notipa is MIT-licensed and packaged with Docker from the ground up. There's no hosted version to sign up for and no vendor in the middle — a school, an NGO, or a ministry of education can run their own instance, on their own server, with their own domain.
A live demo instance is running at app.notipa.org with a sample school, class, and students already set up. Log in with either account below to see what a teacher and a guardian each experience — there's no sign-up, and nothing entered here affects a real school.
Notipa is under active development. These are planned next — nothing here has a date attached, since it's built solo and self-funded, but this is the order of what's coming.
Everything's in the repository — the Docker setup, the environment template, and the app itself. No account required to look at the code.
Notipa is built and maintained by one person, self-funded, with no investors and no ads. The app stays free either way — a donation just goes straight toward hosting costs and time spent building the next feature on the roadmap.