Ladderbug Start
For teachers

Free for your class. Permanently, and without a card.

Up to 35 students, everything unlocked, no purchase order, no trial clock. We would rather be useful in classrooms than bill them.

Why it works on your hardware

The whole application is about 30 kilobytes over the wire and there is no video, no game engine and no install. It loads on a six-year-old Chromebook on shared school wifi in under a second, and once loaded it keeps working when the wifi does not. Students need no email address and no login — a class code and a first name is enough, and even that is optional.

What you can see

  • Group progress by rung, with the standard code attached.
  • Which students are stuck on the same named misconception, so you can pull a small group on Thursday rather than guessing.
  • Median response latency by skill, which is the fastest way to spot the child who is right but still counting on fingers.
  • A printable small-group plan generated from that grouping.

What we will not do to your students

No ads. No upsell shown to a child. No visible difference between a paid and unpaid student — an issue that has drawn a formal FTC complaint against another product in this category, where non-paying children were visibly marked in front of their classmates. No leaderboards. No collection of student personal information.

Fits the way you already teach

The correction routine is model–lead–test–re-firm, the pacing targets roughly 80% success, and review is spaced and cumulative. If you run explicit instruction, none of this will surprise you; it is the same moves, automated for the practice block.

Intervention

Because a rung requires accuracy and speed and stability across days, the mastery record is honest enough to use as progress monitoring. Export is a plain CSV.

School and district

$349 per campus per year for unlimited students and staff, at school and at home. $2 per student per year at district scale, minimum $1,500, with SSO, rostering, district reporting and a signed data agreement. Pricing details.

Getting started

There is nothing to install and nothing to approve. Open the app, hand a device to a student, and watch what happens. Set up a class later if it is worth it.