I spent ten years before Feezy building digital tools for trainers and institutes across India — most of that time at KnowledgeHut upGrad, working with hundreds of educators and coaching directors.
In that time, I saw a lot of problems get solved. Content delivery moved online. Student management got digitised. Marketing became measurable. Scheduling tools arrived. Assessment platforms proliferated.
One problem did not get solved. Getting paid on time, consistently, without it becoming a full-time job or an awkward part of the educator-parent relationship.
I want to tell you why that is — and why Praveen, Teja, and I decided to build something specifically for it.
The pattern we kept seeing
In every coaching institute, every dance academy, every gym I worked with, there was a version of the same Friday or Saturday.
The director — often the founder, often the best teacher in the building — would sit down with their phone and go through their student list. They would open WhatsApp. They would start sending reminders, one by one, to the families who had not paid yet.
Some would reply immediately. Some would say "by Monday." Some would not reply at all.
The director would follow up on Monday. Some would pay. Some would need another nudge. A few would go quiet entirely, and the director would make a judgment call — push harder and risk the relationship, or let it slide and absorb the loss.
This happened every month. Without fail. In institutes that were otherwise well-run, well-regarded, and full of students who were genuinely happy there.
Why it kept happening
The easy answer is that institute owners needed better software. But that is not quite right — by the time Praveen, Teja, and I started building Feezy, there were already fee collection tools in the market. Payment links existed. Reminders could be scheduled.
The real problem was more specific.
First, the tools that existed were built for schools — large institutions with dedicated accounts departments, established billing cycles, and parents who expected formal fee notices. A 120-student coaching institute does not look like a school. It looks like a small business run by one or two people who are also the primary educators, and who have been managing parent relationships personally for years.
Second, the reminder tools that existed treated all parents the same. One blast, one day, same message. This works for some parents and alienates others — particularly the ones who have a good relationship with the institute and feel that a generic reminder is impersonal.
Third — and this is the one that nobody talked about — the emotional cost of chasing money from people you know is real. Institute owners in India often have deep relationships with their students' families. Sending a third reminder to a parent you see at pickup every afternoon is genuinely uncomfortable. So many of them simply did not send it. And the fees leaked.
What we decided to build
We decided that the right product for the Indian SMB institute was not a reminder tool. It was an intelligent collections layer — something that understood individual payer behaviour, timed outreach correctly, escalated appropriately, and stopped immediately when payment arrived.
Something that made the institute owner feel like they had a smart coordinator handling the fee cycle for them — not another software tab to manage.
We called the collections agent Pulse. It maintains a profile for each payer, learns from their payment history and message behaviour, and handles the follow-up cycle without the owner having to think about it.
But before Pulse could work, institutes needed to be able to set up quickly without a complex onboarding process. That became Spark — a conversational agent that configures your entire fee operation through a plain-English conversation. Most institutes are fully set up in under 15 minutes.
We are a small team, we are early, and we are honest about both of those things. We have one live paying institute — Kalanrityaniketan School of Kuchipudi in Hyderabad, a classical dance academy with 800 students across three branches. We built the product around their real requirements, not around theoretical ones.
What we believe
We believe that the director of a 150-student coaching institute should spend their Sunday evening on something other than fee follow-up.
We believe that every parent relationship an institute has built over years should not be strained by clumsy, impersonal payment reminders.
We believe that the tools that serve India's 50,000+ small institutes should feel native to how those institutes actually run — not like a school ERP with the enterprise modules turned off.
That is what we are building. If you run an institute and the problem above sounds familiar, we would be glad to show you what Feezy looks like in practice.
<em>Abhinay Singi is CEO and Co-Founder of Feezy, built by ConvertEdge Tech in Hyderabad. Before Feezy, he spent over ten years at KnowledgeHut upGrad building digital transformation for trainers and institutes across India.</em>