The Valryon journal

Notes from building a school operating system.

Product thinking, design decisions and engineering trade-offs — written plainly, the way we build.

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Product · Featured

Why we killed the SMS bill

Every term, schools burn real money texting parents. We replaced the per-message tax with push notifications and a WhatsApp safety net — and the budget line simply vanished.

Read article 4 min
DesignJul 11, 2026 5 min

Designing for the grandmother on a $40 phone

A child's family isn't always mum and dad. We built multi-guardian profiles and a Simple view so the people who actually raise kids are never locked out by a clever interface.

EngineeringJul 4, 2026 6 min

One database, a thousand schools

Separate servers per school is how a startup goes broke. We isolate every school inside a single PostgreSQL database with row-level security — and keep the bill at zero.