Questions, answered

The school sets a geofence around an event or the campus. Students leave their phone outside it (at home or in the car), then staff scan the barcode on their student ID badge at the door. NIX checks that the student's phone is genuinely outside the geofence at that moment and logs the result. For the school day, a school can also mark a phone zone inside the boundary for students who can't leave a phone off campus, such as bus riders, and a phone stored there counts as phone-free. A scan takes seconds.

At a school running the school day, the app checks one thing during school hours: whether the phone is inside the campus boundary. NIX keeps that answer and one latest reading that overwrites itself, so there is no location history and no map of where a student went. It never reads messages or sees what's on the phone. Outside school hours the school-day check collects nothing. An event the school runs has its own short window, and during it the phone is checked wherever it is. An event window covers every student at the school who has the app and has allowed location, whether or not they plan to go, because NIX can't know ahead of time who will show up. If a student never scans in, nothing is saved to that event and the school sees nothing: the reading just overwrites the last one. At a school that runs events only, that window is the only time location is checked. Verification, not surveillance.

That's the goal: a student whose phone is at home is exactly what phone-free looks like.

No. There's no in-app code to fumble with. Staff scan the barcode on the physical student ID badge the school already issues.

The school chooses the reward and provides it. Each event carries one: it can be a printed coupon the school hands out, free entry to a future event, or a perk saved to the student's ID, like a free drink at the campus cafe, good until the event ends or for a set number of days after. Students never open anything on a phone: whoever scans the badge sees what was earned and tells them.

One subscription per school, per year, sized by enrollment. Every plan is quoted for your school: tell us what you need and we'll email you back with a quote. Once your quote is set, you claim your account. On an annual plan you add a card and your 14-day free trial starts. There are no hardware costs and no setup fees, and checkout runs through Stripe on the web.

No. NIX is completely free for students; they never pay. Schools cover the per-school subscription.

About an hour the first time. An admin creates the school, sets hours and holidays in the web dashboard, maps the campus boundary from the app, and invites staff. After that it is almost nothing: students sign up with their school student ID, and no hardware to distribute means no rollout project.

Pouch programs are reported at roughly $25 to $30 per student per year, plus replacements. NIX has no per-student hardware, so the cost is one software subscription for the school, sized by enrollment, with nothing to buy, distribute, or replace. See our side-by-side comparison with Yondr for the details.