Respondus 4.0 Pricing: Campus License Cost by FTE

A Respondus 4 campus-wide license costs between $1,695 and $2,945 a year in North America, priced on your institution's total student FTE, and it covers unlimited use by every faculty member. Individual instructors can instead buy a single-user license online, and Respondus does not publish a price for that one anywhere on its site. Licenses renew annually on August 1, and the first year is pro-rated on the academic calendar.

Those are the numbers from the Respondus 4 pricing page, checked in August 2026. Below is the full tier table, what the fee does and does not cover, and the arithmetic that decides whether a campus license is good value at your size. If you are budgeting for next academic year, the renewal date is the detail worth writing down first.

Respondus 4 campus-wide license pricing by student FTE

Student FTE enrollment	Annual fee (North America)	Cost per student per year
Under 2,500	$1,695	$0.68 at 2,500 students
2,501 to 10,000	$2,095	$0.21 at 10,000 students
10,001 to 20,000	$2,545	$0.13 at 20,000 students
20,001 to 30,000	$2,745	$0.09 at 30,000 students
30,001 to 40,000	$2,945	$0.07 at 40,000 students
Over 40,000	Ask for a quote	Quoted

The per-student column is ours, not theirs, and it is calculated at the top of each band so it reads as a best case. The shape it shows is the important part: the fee barely moves while enrollment multiplies by sixteen. A university at 40,000 FTE pays 74 percent more than a college at 2,000 FTE while having twenty times the students.

Respondus states that the figure is based on total Student FTE as reported by IPEDS, so it is not a number you self-declare or negotiate down by counting only the departments that will use the software. Rates may also vary in certain countries outside North America or through resellers, and institutions outside North America are permitted a license that renews on January 1 instead.

How much does Respondus 4 cost for a single user?

Respondus does not say. The pricing page confirms a single-user license can be purchased online by individual instructors, but it publishes no figure for it, and the campus-wide table is the only priced thing on the page. Any per-seat number you find on a review aggregator is either out of date or inferred, so treat it that way and ask Respondus directly if you need it for a purchase order.

What Respondus does publish about the single-user route is that it comes with a free 30 day pilot, and that the pilot covers the single-user version only. There is no equivalent evaluation period for the campus-wide license, which is presumably why the pilot exists at all: it lets one instructor prove the workflow against their own learning system before a department goes and asks procurement for a site license.

What does the campus-wide license include?

Unlimited use by all faculty at the institution. There is no seat count to track, no named-user administration and nothing to reconcile at renewal, which is a genuine administrative saving on top of the software.

For the fee you get Respondus 4 itself: an offline Windows exam authoring environment that publishes directly into Canvas, Blackboard, Brightspace and Moodle. It supports 15 question types including calculated and algorithmic formats, imports questions from Microsoft Word with images intact, rich text, QTI and tab or comma delimited files, and includes the Respondus Equation Editor with MathType support. A batch publish feature pushes one assessment to several courses in a single step, and exams can be printed or saved back out to Word or rich text.

The license also opens the Test Bank Network, which is worth pricing separately in your head. Thousands of Respondus-compatible publisher test banks are free to instructors who adopt a participating textbook. If three departments on your campus use those textbooks, that access alone can justify the line item.

When does a Respondus license renew?

August 1, annually, for North American institutions. That date is chosen to sit just before the fall term rather than at a calendar or fiscal year boundary, so a license bought in the spring does not quietly expire in the middle of finals.

Annual fees are pro-rated on the academic year, which means signing in February costs less than a full year rather than buying twelve months that start immediately. Respondus asks you to request a quote to get the current prorate, and a campus-wide license requires a signed license agreement returned with a purchase order number or payment. In procurement terms it behaves like a traditional site license, not a card-on-file subscription.

Is a campus license worth it for a small college?

It depends entirely on how many instructors will open the software, and this is the tier where the answer is genuinely not obvious. A college with 1,800 FTE pays the same $1,695 as one with 2,400. If forty faculty use it regularly, that is $42 per active user per year and it is an easy yes. If four do, it is $424 each, and you are buying a site license to serve a handful of people.

The honest test is to count active authors, not headcount and not enrollment. Assessment authoring tends to concentrate: in most departments a small number of instructors build the exams and everyone else reuses them. Ask which named people published a quiz last term, then divide.

The second thing to check at that size is the operating system, because it is a hard constraint rather than a preference. The published system requirements for Respondus 4 are Windows 11 or 10, full stop. There is no Mac build and no browser version. On a campus where a meaningful share of faculty are on MacBooks, part of what you are buying is a virtual machine, a lab booking or a remote desktop for each of them, and that cost lands on IT rather than on the software line.

What the price does not cover

Three things people assume are included and are not.

• Proctoring. LockDown Browser and Respondus Monitor are separate products with separate licensing. Respondus 4 authors and publishes exams; it does not lock down or watch anyone taking them.
• Any operating system except Windows. Covered above, and worth restating because it is the single most common surprise after purchase.
• Writing the questions. Respondus 4 is an authoring and publishing tool. It imports questions you already have and helps you format and place them, but it does not generate them from your teaching material. If your source is a recorded lecture rather than a Word document, there is nothing yet to import.

How Respondus 4 pricing compares with per-user quiz tools

They are billed on opposite axes, which makes a straight comparison misleading unless you fix the variable. Respondus charges the institution once and ignores how many people use it. Most modern quiz tools charge per author per month and ignore institution size. So the crossover point is a headcount, not a price.

Roughly: a $19 per month per-author tool costs $228 a year for one person and $2,280 for ten. Against a $1,695 campus license, the campus license wins from about eight active authors upward at the smallest tier, and it wins far earlier at every tier above that. Below eight, per-user billing is cheaper and considerably easier to cancel. That is the whole calculation, and it does not require a spreadsheet.

What the calculation misses is that the two categories often are not substitutes. If the gap in your workflow is that nobody has time to watch a three-hour recorded lecture and write twenty questions from it, a cheaper authoring tool does not help, because authoring is not the bottleneck. That is the job a browser-based Respondus alternative is aimed at: paste a YouTube link and get draft multiple-choice questions with the correct answer, a written explanation and a timestamp back to the moment each question came from, then export QTI 1.2 for Canvas or Brightspace, Moodle GIFT, a Blackboard tab-delimited upload, a Google Forms CSV or a PDF with the answer key. For a Vimeo link, an MP4, a webinar recording or a screen capture you paste that video's transcript alongside it, because there is no speech-to-text of our own.

Used together the split is clean. Generate the draft from the recording, export a QTI package, and let Respondus 4 or the LMS handle the publishing your campus already paid for. Nobody has to choose.

Does any of this apply outside higher education?

Only partly. The FTE tiers are built around IPEDS reporting, which is a US higher-education dataset, so a corporate training team has no FTE figure to price against and would be quoted instead. The whole licensing model assumes an institution with faculty, courses and an academic calendar.

If the assessment you are building is staff onboarding or annual compliance training rather than a for-credit course, the software category is different too, and it usually belongs in a system built to train and certify employees that tracks completion against an employee record rather than a gradebook. Buying academic assessment software for corporate training tends to end with a tool nobody can report out of.

The short version

Respondus 4 campus-wide licensing is $1,695 to $2,945 a year by student FTE, unlimited faculty use, renewing every August 1, with a quote required above 40,000 students. Single-user pricing exists but is unpublished. It is very good value at a large institution, defensible at a mid-sized one, and a real judgment call for a small college with few active exam authors. Before you sign, count the instructors who will actually use it and check how many of them are on a Mac.