Lazarus lets you charge an application fee and adjust that fee over time — for example, offering an early-bird rate that steps up as your deadline approaches. This guide explains how to set prices on your application, how time-based pricing works, and how to run a free application.
Open the application you created from the Application forms tab and edit its details. Pricing is configured alongside the application's name and school year.
Before you set amounts, confirm your pricing mode (per student or per household) is what you want — it determines whether each price is charged per child or once per family. See Create an Enrollment Application for the difference.
Instead of a single fixed fee, an application can have several price tiers, each with its own start date. Lazarus automatically charges whichever tier is active on the day a family applies. As one tier's window ends and the next begins, the price a family sees updates on its own — you don't have to change anything manually.
A common three-tier setup looks like this:
You're not limited to three, and you can name tiers whatever makes sense for your school.
For each tier, you'll provide:
Add as many tiers as you need, then save. Make sure your start dates line up in order so there are no gaps between tiers.
Tip: Set your first tier's start date to today (or earlier) so pricing is active the moment you share your application. If the earliest tier starts in the future, families who apply before then may not see a price.
If you don't want to charge anything, set your application price to $0 or leave pricing unconfigured. Families will be able to submit without entering any payment information, and you can skip connecting Stripe for that form.
Free applications are a good fit for schools that collect information first and handle tuition separately, or for interest forms and waitlists.
Whether families or your school absorbs the Stripe processing fee and the Lazarus platform fee is set globally, not per tier. Those toggles live in Applications > Settings and apply to all of your applications at once. See Application Settings & Emails and Accept Payments through Stripe for the full picture.
Important: Because fee handling is global, changing it affects every application you run — factor that in when you decide your amounts here.
With pricing in place, you're ready to build the questions families will answer.