Most prep is sold one login at a time. The candidate buying it is rarely alone: they are in a campus GMAT club, an analyst class that all sat the same autumn, an MBA society, a company sending six people to business school on its own budget. The group is already there, already meeting, already comparing pacing in a chat thread at eleven at night. The software just never had a way to meet the group instead of the person.
Brightroom for Institutions is that way. An organisation gets one shared code. Everyone who joins through it pays 20% less for their first plan, and the institution earns 10% of what each member spends, sent by bank transfer. The two numbers are independent: neither comes out of the other, and neither comes out of a price we raised first so we could discount it back.
The reasonable question is who pays for the discount
Group deals in this category are usually one of three things, and all three are worth naming. The first is a markup wearing a markdown: the list price is quietly raised so the “20% off” lands back at the number it was always going to be. The second turns the member into a salesperson (refer three friends, earn a credit), which is a job, not a discount. The third skims the partner’s cut out of the member’s own payment, so the group is paid with the member’s money and told it was free.
This is none of those. The 20% comes off the same price on the public pricing page that every other candidate pays; there is no second, higher price for institutions to discount from. The 10% is paid by Brightroom, out of its own margin, to the institution directly. On the $1,599 Ultra plan a member pays $1,279.20 ($319.80 less), and the institution receives $127.92. One of those is a lower price. The other is a transfer we send. They do not touch.
One code, attributed once
The mechanic is small by design. The institution gets a code and a short link: brightroom.com/i/ and the code. A member follows it, registers, and the discount is already sitting on the checkout, previewed before a card number is typed. When they pay, the institution’s share is recorded in its portal that night, with the date and the amount.
A member is attributed once, ever. Not once a month, not again at renewal. Once. The institution is paid for bringing a candidate to Brightroom, not for that candidate staying subscribed, because paying a bounty on every renewal is how a referral program learns to reward churn. The institution code is also mutually exclusive with our personal referral program: if a member arrives carrying both, the institution wins and no second reward is paid on the same order. One order, one attribution, one number everyone can check.
A portal, not a spreadsheet emailed each quarter
An institution gets the same kind of surface its members get. The portal opens on an overview, then breaks into the parts a partner actually needs: a members view of its own cohort (who joined, who converted, how they are scoring), an earnings ledger with every commission and its payout state, and a toolkit holding the code, the link, a poster and social cards drawn to match the brand, and an outreach email already written. Insights shows the funnel and the month-over-month momentum; settings holds the payout details, with the owner able to write and a viewer able only to read.
Getting in is an invitation, not a funnel. We approve an institution, which provisions a partner account and emails a single button: set a password, open the dashboard. There is no trial to start, no plan to buy to run the portal, no paywall in front of the people doing the organising. The staff seat is free because the staff are not the customer; their members are.
What it is not
It is not an affiliate scheme with the serial numbers filed off. Members do not recruit members; only the institution earns, and only once per person. It is not a coupon hunt. There is one code per institution, tied to a real organisation we approved, not a field to brute-force in the checkout. And the reward is money, not a bigger balance: the institution is paid out, not handed app credit it can only spend back inside Brightroom. Two edges are honest to name. A refund today is reconciled by hand rather than clawed back automatically, and the toolkit ships the link rather than a generated QR code. Both are short follow-ons, stated here so the program is exactly what it says it is.
Why we built it
Brightroom is built to be faithful to the test: the section-locked timer, the three-change budget, the band that doesn’t flatter. For Institutions is the same instinct pointed at how serious candidates actually organise themselves. The strongest preparation is partly social: a cohort that sits the same mock the same week, argues about a Data Insights prompt over coffee, holds each other to a timer nobody wants to run alone. Those groups already negotiate for everything around the test: the test-centre booking, the official guides, the room they sit in on a Sunday. The thing they prepare with can now belong to the group too, and pay the group back for gathering.
The room was always built for one person at a time. The group was always standing just outside it. This is the door that lets them in together.
Nicola & Joel