Children’s home software pricing, published in full

What Hearth costs

Supported accommodation is priced per place

£25 per place per month, or £22 on the annual plan, excluding VAT. Counted across your whole registration rather than per building, so twenty places costs the same whether that is four houses or twenty self-contained flats.

A minimum of £99 a month applies up to 3 places, or £89 up to 4 on the annual plan, because a service that size still needs the Regulation 32 reviews and the whole notification catalogue running for it. It is a floor, not a commitment: there is still no contract.

Run both? The setting is chosen per premises and the bill is the sum of its parts: children’s homes by bed band, supported accommodation by place. One login, one invoice. More on what differs is on the supported accommodation page.

Free until Ofsted registers you

If you are going through registration, Hearth is free until your URN comes through. Not a trial with a countdown on it: free until you are actually trading.

The reason is selfish enough to be believable. A home that arrives at day one with its policies, forms, staff records and rota already loaded is a home that stays. And the work of setting all that up is work you have to do for the registration visit anyway, so you may as well do it once, in the system you are going to keep using.

Registration slips, constantly, for reasons that have nothing to do with you. Nothing switches off because a date you guessed at came and went. Billing starts when Ofsted grants your URN, and not before.

What is not an extra

• Every staff account, including bank and agency. There is no per-seat charge.
• Setup, data import and onboarding. Migration from your current system is included, not quoted separately.
• The whole regulatory surface: Annex A export, Regulation 40 notifications, Regulation 44 independent-visitor access, Regulation 45 review, evidence packs.
• The Responsible Individual’s multi-home view, on every plan, because every home has an RI.
• Updates. There is no version you have to upgrade to.

Why this price is on the page and theirs is not

Almost every provider in this sector asks you to book a call to find out what it costs. That is not evasiveness for its own sake. Quote-only pricing exists so the number can move with the size of the buyer, which works well if you are a twelve-home group with a procurement lead and badly if you are one manager running one home.

Publishing the number removes that negotiation entirely. It also means you can compare Hearth against anyone else in about a minute, including deciding it is not for you, without giving anybody your phone number first.

Four questions to ask any vendor, including this one

1. Per user, per bed, or per home? Per-user pricing looks cheap at three staff and expensive at twenty. Ask what the total is with your actual rota, including bank cover.
2. What is the minimum term, and what is the notice period? Get it in writing. A twelve-month auto-renew with ninety days’ notice is a two-year decision wearing a one-year coat.
3. What is core and what is a module? Medication, training records, rotas and reporting are sometimes priced separately. Ask for the total for everything you will actually switch on.
4. What happens to the records at the end, and in what format? “You can export” is not an answer. Ask whether the export includes attachments, whether it preserves authorship and timestamps, and how long you have to take it.

Those four are worth asking whoever you buy from. If the answers here are ever worse than a competitor’s, buy the competitor.

Who Hearth is not for

It is a short list and it is honest, because a demo that was never going to work wastes your afternoon as much as mine.

• Adult social care. Hearth is built around Ofsted and the Children’s Homes Regulations. If you are CQC regulated, this is the wrong product.
• Large groups wanting bespoke workflow builds. Above roughly ten homes you will likely want configuration Hearth does not yet do.
• Anyone who needs rostering and payroll as the primary system. Hearth records care and produces evidence. It is not a workforce-management platform.

And the practical limits, which are a different question from who it is for. These are the ones you would otherwise find out after signing:

• Not a controlled drugs register, and it does not replace a paper MAR where your policy requires one.
• No offline mode. It works on a phone in a browser, but it needs a connection.
• No native app in the app stores.
• England only for the regulatory layer. The recording works anywhere; Annex A and Ofsted notifications do not.

Who built this

I spent 7 years working in children’s residential care before building Hearth. I know what a 2am incident write-up actually takes, and what it is like to reconcile Annex A against a year of logs in the fortnight before an inspection. Hearth exists because I wanted the recording to do that work continuously instead.

Hearth is new. Here is exactly how new.

Hearth is early and has a small number of homes on it. I would rather write that down than imply otherwise, because you are in a profession trained to notice unevidenced claims, and because the trade is a real one: you get me on the phone rather than a ticket queue, you shape what gets built next, and your price is fixed for the life of the account. If you would rather buy from an incumbent with a decade of installs, that is a perfectly sensible decision and I would not argue you out of it.

What is checkable, rather than asserted, is on the trust and security pages: where data is hosted, who the sub-processors are, how retention works, and how access is controlled.

Pricing questions

Prices exclude VAT and are per home, per month. Full detail of what Hearth does is on the home page, moving from another system is covered on switching, and the guides cover the regulatory background in depth. Hearth is an independent software provider and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to Ofsted.

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