Built in Pretoria, for classrooms the way they actually run.
PJ Empire is a small Pretoria-based product studio. We built Education Portal because every TVET lecturer we spoke to was keeping attendance in a notebook, scrolling WhatsApp for yesterday's slides, and chasing students on NSFAS deadlines.
How we work
Honesty over features
We say no to 'unlimited'. Every tier has a clear cap on students, messages, and response time, so campuses get what they pay for and we can stay around long enough to support it.
Built for load-shedding
Offline-first PWA, SMS-inbound booking fallback, queued sync. Stage 6 should not lose a lecturer a week.
Ready for procurement
POPIA-conscious defaults. DHET-formatted CSV export. Audit log exports on request. No bespoke integration debt for every client.
SA-first, not SA-only
We design for R1 500 Android phones, patchy 4G, and procurement teams that need a decision in one afternoon. The portal scales up from there, not down.