We Built a School Platform With AI. Enrollment Went 95 to 230.

Should you build custom software with AI instead of buying it?

The old answer was obvious: buy it. Building custom meant a budget, a team, and months. So you licensed something close enough and lived with the gaps.

Ian Kilpatrick's wife needed a way for parents and students to log in, check enrollment, and see classes, and for teachers to enter them. What she was describing was a learning management system. Ian had never seen one, because he graduated before they existed.

He built it anyway. Saints Classical, a classical tutorial in Middle Tennessee, now runs on it.

How do you build something you have never seen before?

The first move was not writing code. It was asking. Ian went to Claude saying he did not know what he was doing, and it walked him through how Google Classroom, Blackboard, and Blackbaud each handle it. He pulled the parts he liked and discarded the rest.

That is the whole trick, and it is why not knowing the category turned out not to matter. The AI has seen every LMS. You supply the taste and the requirements; it supplies the reference.

The first version launched to 95 students. For the second, Ian installed an agent directly on the server to help build the next iteration, and to keep helping after launch: when a problem comes in, he pastes his wife's text to the agent, tells it to fix the issue and email the parent when it is done, and it does.

“I basically started brainstorming with Claude, and then Claude Code, and built the first iteration of the LMS.”

Ian Kilpatrick · 33:38

What does custom software cost now?

Alec's estimate is the useful anchor. Ten years ago this system meant licensing something for tens of thousands a year, or paying $50,000 to $100,000 to have it built custom.

That is an estimate of the alternative, not an invoice Ian paid. What he actually spent was his own time plus AI tooling. The comparison is the point: the build-versus-buy math that held for two decades has inverted for a large class of internal software.

And what he got is not a compromise. It takes tuition, handles enrollment and club signups, has its own email system, and has Slack-style groups built in. No unused features, and nothing missing.

“you're probably in the 50 to $100,000 range for custom building”

Alec Saluga · 38:14

What did the AI-written blog actually do?

The agent on the server set up the school's blog and posts to it 2 to 3 times per day, written in a persona attributed to C.S. Lewis and scoped to what the school actually teaches. It is now over 300 posts, maybe around 350.

The goal was E-E-A-T: enough expert, experienced, authoritative, trustworthy material for Google to recommend the school higher. People find the articles, and because they are relevant to the curriculum, some of those readers end up signing up.

Enrollment went from 95 students to over 230 for the next year, roughly two and a half times. Ian's own framing is worth keeping intact rather than tidying up: he credits programmatic SEO and AI automation "largely", and then immediately says "I don't know if that's normal. I mean, she's done a great job on the school itself." AI helped quite a bit. It did not do it alone, and he is the first to say so.