Most LMS RFPs are a feature checklist, and every vendor ticks every box, so the document that was supposed to differentiate them produces a tie. The questions below are the ones we ask on client evaluations instead. They are written so a vague answer is visibly a vague answer — which is most of the work.
Copy them, paste them into your own document, and send them before the demo rather than after. The answers you get in writing are worth more than anything said on a call, and asking early tells you how a vendor behaves when they are still trying to win you.
A note on how to read this: for each question there is the answer you want, and the answer that should end the conversation. "Disqualifying" is doing real work in that phrase. These are not preferences — they are the responses that reliably predict an unhappy year two.
Commercials
1. What is the total cost in years one, two and three, for our actual numbers?
Give them your learner count, your branch count and your admin headcount, and ask for three years, not one. Renewal pricing, per-user growth, and anything that steps up at a threshold should all be visible.
Want: a written three-year figure with the assumptions stated. Disqualifying: a year-one price and "we can discuss renewals later."
2. Do you take a percentage of the fees we collect?
Ask it directly, because it is often not in the headline price. Some platforms charge a licence plus a percentage of collections — Graphy, for instance, is publicly reported at ₹25K–1L a year plus 5–10% per sale, and app-first coaching platforms commonly sit in the 10–20% range. At ₹1 crore of annual collections, 7% is ₹7 lakh a year, every year, for software.
Want: no revenue share, or a share with a written cap or a sunset at a revenue threshold. Disqualifying: an uncapped percentage of collections, or an evasive answer to a direct question about one.
3. What is not included?
The useful form of this question is asking what past customers were surprised to be billed for. Messaging volume, storage, AI usage, app-store developer fees, additional environments, training days, integration work.
Want: a specific list, offered without defensiveness. Disqualifying: "everything is included." Nothing is everything, and this answer means you will find the boundary yourself.
Your data
4. Export our trial account now and send us the file.
Not a promise about export — the actual file, during the evaluation. Check that it contains learner records with history, the question bank in a re-importable format, assessment attempts with per-question responses, attendance, and payment history.
Want: complete structured data within a day, without a support ticket. Disqualifying: "we'll handle that if you ever decide to leave." Anything a vendor will not demonstrate during the sale is something they cannot demonstrate.
5. What happens to our data if we terminate?
Format, deadline, and what is deleted when. This belongs in the contract with a number of days attached, not in an email.
Want: a defined export window, a named format, and written deletion commitments. Disqualifying: no contractual export obligation. We wrote about why this one matters more than it looks in leaving an LMS without losing five years of data.
6. Who owns the video content, and where does it live?
Specifically: do you hold the source files, or only streaming access? Institutes discover the difference at the worst possible moment.
Want: you own and can retrieve the sources. Disqualifying: streaming-only access with no path to the originals.
Operations
7. What is the largest simultaneous exam you have run, with a date?
Education traffic is flat and then everyone does the same thing in the same four minutes. Almost nobody measures this, including most vendors.
Want: a number, a date, and how it was measured. Disqualifying: "it scales automatically, it's on the cloud." That sentence means nobody has measured it. We wrote up what actually breaks at that moment, and none of it was infrastructure.
8. Walk us through a partial payment, then a refund, then the reconciliation report.
Fee collection is where these projects quietly fail, because being 98% right is not good enough when the other 2% is somebody's child's admission.
Want: all three demonstrated in the product, with no spreadsheet appearing. Disqualifying: any step that ends with "and then finance handles that manually."
9. Show us the message a parent receives when their child misses an assessment — send it to my phone now.
Tests three things at once: whether messaging reaches the channel people actually read, whether guardians are a real audience in the product, and whether the person demoing can operate their own system unaided.
Want: it arrives, on the channel your parents use, while you are on the call. Disqualifying: a screenshot instead of a message.
Change and integration
10. Send us your API documentation.
The URL, not a call about it. You will eventually need this platform to talk to a school ERP, an accounting system, a biometric device or an existing single sign-on.
Want: public documentation you can read before signing. Disqualifying: documentation behind an NDA. If integration is a sales conversation now, it will be one every time.
11. We are adding a branch with a different fee structure next quarter. Walk us through it.
This measures what change costs in year two: configuration you do yourself, a support ticket in a queue, or a quoted development project.
Want: an administrator does it unaided, on screen. Disqualifying: anything that begins "we'd scope that."
12. What are the three things customers most often ask for that you do not do?
The single most informative question on this list, and the one most likely to be dodged. Every product has a list. A vendor who will say theirs out loud is telling you they expect the relationship to survive contact with reality.
Want: three specific things, said without flinching. Disqualifying: "nothing really — we cover everything." You have just learned how this vendor will handle the first thing that goes wrong.
How to actually run it
Send all twelve at once, before the demo. Split across calls, they turn into a negotiation. Sent together, they are a document you can compare across vendors.
Score them the same way for every vendor. We use the eight-axis rubric in how to evaluate an LMS — these twelve questions map onto those axes, and the weights are what make the comparison yours rather than generic.
Let the person who will administer the system hold a veto. Not IT alone, not the founder alone. Question 11 is discovered after signature by whoever does the daily work, and they are the one who should have decided.
Give it three to five weeks. One week to shortlist and send, two to three weeks of hands-on trials with your own data, one week for reference calls. Faster and you are buying the demo.
Common questions
Is a formal RFP overkill for a small institute? The document is, the questions are not. Under a few hundred learners, send questions 1, 2, 4, 7 and 12 by email and you will have most of the value in an afternoon.
A vendor refuses to answer in writing. Is that fatal? Not automatically — some genuinely cannot commit to pricing without scoping. It is fatal for questions 2, 4 and 5, which are matters of fact rather than judgement, and a refusal there is itself the answer.
How many vendors should receive this? Three. Two is not enough to calibrate what a good answer looks like; five and nobody completes the trials properly.
Should we tell vendors who else is bidding? No. It changes the answers you get, usually toward matching a competitor's claims rather than describing their own product.
What if every vendor fails question 7? Common, and not necessarily disqualifying on its own — but ask each to run a test before you sign, and make the result a condition. A vendor who agrees is telling you something useful; one who refuses is telling you more.
We use this list on client evaluations before recommending anything, including before recommending against a custom build. If you are running an evaluation and want a second read on the answers you are getting, talk to our team.