Starting right away, Securly is announcing our intent to offer free Chromebook filtering to K-12 schools outside the US, Canada, and Mexico at no cost. We wanted to take a moment to explain clearly why we’ve chosen to go this way.
Securly has always been and will always be a company with a double-bottom line mission. We would like to perpetuate our goal of keeping kids safe online. And we would like to do so on a global scale while being a sustainable business. To this end, we have already released Auditor which is being used by over 600 schools worldwide and scans over 1.5 million emails daily for signs of cyber-bullying and self-harm. The Securly team gets testimonials on practically a daily basis from Auditor users on how the product helped pre-empt serious incidents in their school or district. Here is one such testimonial:
These testimonials are the reason many of our team members get out of bed and come to work every day. As a startup – a question we are obligated to ask ourselves every day is “How can we have more impact faster?” To us SecurlyFree is one such way.
Free vs. Paid
- What is Free?
- If you are a K-12 IT Admin outside North America, you get free web-filtering for your Chromebooks by using our free Chrome Extension.
- Our parent portal that enables schools to let parents know how their kids school-issued Chromebooks are being used.
- Self-harm/Cyberbullying detection on Social Media.
- What is Paid?
- The Securly DNS solution that filters all devices. This is the part of our offering that we consider our core intellectual property. Our whole school filtering has already gained mass acceptance within the US as an alternative to hardware appliance-based web filters.
- Responses from our support team. As you can imagine, it is hard to sustain a free product with human powered support. Having said that, we’ve gone through a great deal of engineering to ensure that the Chrome extension is 100% self-serve (see below).
Why the Chrome Extension?
- The trend in recent years in the Chrome filtering space has been rapid and massive commoditization. Competing in a commodity market will only deter our International expansion efforts.
- We’ve found the Chrome extension extremely easy to use with very little support overhead – and for this reason, it lends its self well to self-serve and a zero support model (both of which are needed for the viability of any model that is based on “free”).
- While Chromebooks are dominating the US K-12 space, it is still a Microsoft world out there. Chromebooks have tight-knit online communities the world over – precisely the conditions that drive beachhead adoption of any solution.
How do I sign up?
The Chrome Extension installation experience is 100% self-serve (10-mins is all it takes – we promise) and you can sign up and install it yourself by going here. We also offer a daily UI walk-through webinar that goes over core functionality that you can sign up for by going here. One of our engineers will be on call to drive the webinar and answer any and all questions you might have about the product.
