Contract terms, including oftentimes pricing. We can really target those markets. We can target those customers. We can target customers that are close to customers that are ours who have endured our service. We can work with resellers who are active in those particular markets. We have incredible visibility about our opportunities. We've also now got five or six years of history of targeting those particular regions, customers, or working with particular resellers. We then go through our planning cycles and allocate individual numbers to our sales teams and individual salespeople and success people. We have incredible visibility into what's coming for us in the next 12 months, and it's represented in this chart. The ARR that we book turns into revenue very reliably and turns into cash flow very reliably.
In fact, historically, the end-of-year ARR, which for us at 30 June, was $145 million, almost to the dollar, turns into cash flow, cash collections, and revenue in the subsequent year. From the planning cycles all the way through to delivery, bookings, revenue, cash collection, this business is incredibly predictable, which is a great place for us to be. It's the reason why we've now started to become a little bit more forthright in providing guidance to the capital markets, which we did for the first time in June, which I'll cover off in a moment. We're achieving something pretty remarkable in this business, actually, which is reflected in these charts here. We're not only, through our performance and brand recognition, particularly in the U.S., climbing up the totem pole into these major districts. We've got a school district in the top six.
We've got many school districts in the top 100 now. Massive districts with hundreds of thousands of students. These are huge enterprises that, at their scale, are expecting discounts on the products that we buy. We're achieving sales at the big end of town in education. We're selling more products at higher price points. Our average sales price on the chart on the left is going up, reflecting that we're getting to bigger districts. The ARR per student, so essentially the average license fees that we're delivering, is going up because we're increasing our price points because of our reputation and we're selling more products. You see that reflected on the chart on the top right. We're selling more and more incremental dollar values of all of our products into all of our markets.
Achieving all of that is a fantastic result, and it's a testament to the ability of our engineering product teams to deliver products that add value to customers and our sales teams to take those up and create amazing experiences with their support and delivery teams for our customers. That is a very unique achievement to be able to achieve all of those things. All that means leverage is kicking in. One thing we've done very well in the last few years is keep our costs, operating costs, flat. We've also improved our gross margins by making our variable costs, you know, limiting growth in our variable costs. You see that latter point in the top chart.
Our average revenue per student is, so this is just in the K-12 business, climbing consistently every year, but the cost to deliver that service, which is data, hosting, hardware, and marketing costs, and channel reseller commissions, of course, they're staying flat on a per unit basis. That's the jaws opening up at the gross margin line. What's that allowing on the chart below, given our fixed costs now are stabilized, it's turning into EBITDA margin and giving us confidence of now providing guidance to the capital markets about our EBITDA margins going forward. I've seen a lot of commentary today talking about the inflection point, and that's reflected in these two charts here. This is a new piece of information which we haven't provided before, but I think people will find it interesting. We now, in the U.S., let's focus on the U.S. now, penetration of the market.
As I said before, we've got about 17% for 16 years. 16% - 17% of students in the U.S. are looked after by us. 14 states in the U.S. have, we're in 20% or more, 20% or more of students are using a product. Seven states is 30%, four states is 14%. In one state, 63% of students in that state are looked after by us. 63% of students in one state, and this isn't a small state, it's a pretty big state. I'm often asked the question, you know, how big could it be? How far can you penetrate into the market? In some analysis, maybe we can get to 63% or maybe higher. The bottom line is there is a phenomenal and huge opportunity here. The U.S. is enormous. It's not monolithic like the U.K. or the Australian private sector.
It is a big place with all sorts of different procurement practices and all sorts of different challenges and problems to be solved. We're showing that we can take up those different regional differences and solve those regional challenges in a very clever way. I don't know how far our penetration could get to, but certainly our U.S. team, and Crispin's on the call if people want to probe him on that. I'm pretty confident in getting to the north of 30% in the medium term, let's say. We all put these up now because I think, on the things that really matter beyond profitability and growth, right? How are we actually performing in delivering good services to customers and doing so efficiently? These are real highlights in my opinion. You know, our recurring revenue, all of our revenue is essentially recurring revenue.
Our service margins are over 93%, which gives us the ability to really drive up our marketing costs as our growth kicks in, where for every customer that we're losing, we're adding more revenue from existing customer base. We're still losing a very low 5.5% of our customers each year. I think that's probably going to be the high point over the coming years because we're doing amazing things at reducing churn. We essentially get no bad debts. For every dollar that we pour into advertising, we get $9 in return. Very efficient business. Now we've kind of hit that critical mass of cost structure. Customers are knowing us. For the most part, that growth is accelerating and that growth is turning into EBITDA margins at the bottom. Okay, what's next?
As I said before, with the predictability in our business, the now years of strong growth, and I guess also the fact that we've made great strides in bringing these different businesses, people, and technology together, we're now comfortable providing more guidance to the capital markets. This half, so for December 2025, we're obviously expecting free cash flow. I think Ben will also talk about the cash collections versus last year. I think the guidance of our call is 20% higher than last year. That's so far flowing very neatly. For the financial year 2026, we're expecting revenue of + $140 million. I think there's real upside there. ARR growth of 20%+ . I think there's upside there. EBITDA margins of 20%. That's the kind of promise that we're making.
Every dollar that we make beyond that, we want to pour into marketing, particularly in the Qustodio business, which is doing incredibly well. For the financial year, we expect to be free cash flow positive. I guess that is where I'll wrap up. Let me make the point again about the scale of this opportunity. We're only getting started, and we're only really focused on two primary English-speaking markets. This problem is a global problem. We also have a small business in Spain that's starting to open up international non-English-speaking markets to our K-12 proposition, and it's growing at 100% year on year. This is a global problem. There's no dominant provider anywhere. We're hoping to be that global name in safety. It's an industry that's backed by regulation globally, that's funded globally because you have to protect kids when they're under institutional care.
We are unquestionably the innovator in this space, and we're now starting to really see the improvements in our business, our cost structure, and evaluating the customers through the introduction of artificial intelligence. I think I'll be talking a lot more over the next 12 months about where else we can go with this safety proposition. In the U.S., there's obviously huge concerns around security and real-world safety. Where is my child when there is an active shooter at school? These are things that penetrate the minds of communities in the U.S., and those are things that are an obvious extension of what we do. You'll hear us talking more about that. For me, I'll hand over to Ben, and then we'll open up to Q&A.
Thanks, Tim. If you can jump to the next slide, please. Thank you. I won't go into too much detail around the financials because we obviously announced at least the P&L in the July quarterly. There's not really any new information here. On the P&L, I guess the theme is similar. You know, costs are under control. We're growing top line. There was a small adjustment from the July numbers, reallocating some costs from direct costs into admin. That's the only change. Otherwise, the numbers that we presented in July are all the same, down to the earnings after tax line. Nothing from an overall P&L perspective, just a reclassification to tidy up something within there. The gross margin ended up the year at about 75%, which was pleasing. On direct costs, you can see in here the effort that's gone into cloud and data and hosting.
There's a lot of efficiency there that the team has managed to get that we've talked about in the past. That's allowed us to spend a little bit more money on marketing. As Tim mentioned, going into the new financial year, we'll aim to meet the guidance targets around EBITDA and invest a little bit more in the marketing spend as well to continue to accelerate growth in Qustodio. Depreciation and amortization, I won't touch on anything here. That's really just for people's information. Balance sheet, again, the message really here is that the balance sheet is now in a good position. The debt consolidation work from the last sort of 12 - 24 months was complete earlier in the FY 2024 financial year. There's still three years left to run on the Ashgrove facility maturing in June 2028. From a capital perspective, we're in a good position.
Cash flows, again, we've touched on cash flows to a degree. The thing I'll reiterate here and some of the feedback we've had today was around the 20% growth in cash collections guidance that was put in the July quarterly. I think the main thing to reiterate there is that was on the interest slide. The actual guidance slide hasn't changed at all. The 20% growth expectation in cash receipts in the first half of the year lines up with the free cash flow guidance that's on that slide. Nothing has changed. You can see in the bottom line there that we aim to continue to grow revenue and receipts at 20% +. Yeah, just reiterating that absolutely nothing has changed there, and July receipts are in line with that expectation. There's nothing that I'm saying that is worrying me at this point in time around cash receipts.
On that basis, I'm happy to open up to questions. Anyway, Tim, you should be able to turn on your microphone now and ask your question.
Hi, Tim. Can you hear me?
Yes, mate. How are you going?
Yeah, good, thanks. Yeah, thank you for the presentation. I think just a lot of it, as you pointed out, has been pre-reported. You know, apologies for asking this, but this I think comes up as kind of like the one key concern, speaking to investors about the positive story for yourselves is that I think the one thing that has changed between now and I guess Q4 is the share price is up more materially, at $0.60 versus $0.40 back then. Just in terms of thoughts around cap raise, does this influence our view in any way? Sorry to bring it up.
No, absolutely not. We don't need to raise money, don't plan to raise money. I certainly have got zero interest in a, you know, opportunistic capital raising. Of course, as our share price hit mid-60s, all sorts of brokers came to us and said, "Hey, now's your chance." However, no, myself and our board have got zero interest in that. Obviously, you need to leave your options open in case there is a, you know, a creative acquisition down the track. An opportunistic balance sheet style capital raising has got no interest in this organization.
Okay, perfect. In terms of, I guess, you know, talking about previously M&A activities, mergers of two equals and all that kind of stuff, are you able to just give us a bit of an update as to how you're thinking about that at this point in time? Thanks.
Yeah, look, that's a good question. At the $0.40 range, it was really difficult. In the $0.60 and $0.70 range, I think fair value is still to come for our business. That's a currency that can be used. As we have spoken about this in the past, there's a lot of subscale, meaning good tech, good cultural fit type organizations in education. In some of those adjacencies I've already mentioned—real world safety, security, mental health, you name it—that would look good in our business, look good in our colors. I'm honestly chasing us because we've got a fantastic reputation as being a good home for these businesses. I think there's some chance for that. The thing that we will not put at risk though is our guidance, our EBITDA guidance, our cash flow guidance. That's a pretty high bar for anybody to join our party now.
They've got to be a creditor to our story and our financials.
Yeah, makes a lot of sense. Thanks. It's always good to hear the good story reiterated. That's all for me. Cheers.
Thanks, mate.
Okay, Way, you should be able to turn your microphone on now.
Hey, you can hear me now? Yeah. Gotcha.
Yep.
Excellent. Okay, cool. Just a single question from me, but multi-part. Appreciate everyone's very busy today. When thinking about guidance, what are the big sort of swing factors that will result in you guys exceeding or missing? Are there any large contracts that you're assuming that you renew or win or anything like that? The September quarter is very important, obviously, for you guys. I just wanted to see if by 1Q whether you'd be confident enough to kind of refine guidance or realistically, would we have to wait for the whole half to be through before we think about refining of guidance?
To answer your first question, the key thing that can have a material impact on our guidance is, in my view, foreign exchange movements. That has impacted us before. On a net basis, not so much because we are quite naturally hedged in where our costs and revenues come from. On top line in ARR, so cash collections, ARR, and revenue, it can have an impact. That is the only thing, and we keep displaying, subject to index movements. Again, thinking about our business, most of our sales in the U.S. and U.K. happen in the June half. A big chunk, 60%- 70% of those sales, turn into invoicing in the second half of the calendar year.
Therefore, the ARR growth that Crispin was saying will deliver this year does not have a massive impact. It is not irrelevant, but it does not have a huge impact on our financial results for the coming year. The results for the 2026 financial year, a big chunk of it is already baked in, with our existing customer base, the services we have already deployed, and the revenue that will follow from that. I hope that answers your question. We can obviously get things wrong and advise for customers and leave customers. These are contracts, and we have a good track record of looking after customers and managing their expectations. Is there upside in what is baked into our business? Absolutely.
There is a pipeline of deals that Crispin's team have got. There are some big deals that always float outside of our pipeline, which we talk about from time to time. Also, our Qustodio business is a shining light in the business. Now we have more capital to give it, we are seeing some very exciting growth. In fact, I am hoping to host a session in the next few weeks to talk about the excitement that we are seeing in that business. I am flying to Barcelona on Saturday to spend a week with that outstanding team to go through their strategy for next year. There is upside, yes, but a good chunk, I could not tell you the percentage of it, but a good chunk of our financials for next year are already baked into this business.
Yeah, cool. Thanks,
Johno.
Hey guys, sorry, you've actually got James here. I couldn't raise my hand on my side. I'm just speaking on behalf of Unified on Johno, then maybe just a few from me. Firstly, you've flagged that significant product update imminent for Qustodio, and then you've got Content Aware, AI, and Data offerings for the K-12 business as well. Can you give us an idea of whether they're accretive to our booths and sort of when are they live and what sort of uplift we can expect there, if any?
Yeah, so the Qustodio team, what they're doing is they're trying to move their focus from, and this might get a little bit complicated, they're moving their focus from a direct customer, you know, focus on that anxious parent whose 13-year-old child has become addicted to gaming or Instagram or they've watched a porno or they've been bullied. That's quite an anxious parent that wants to do all sorts of things to look after their child and they're happy to pay, you know, $150 right now to have that problem solved. They're trying to move away from that being the focus of their customer, that highly anxious parent, which are difficult to find online. They're competing for that SEO, you know, search term against Bark and Aura and others through more of a general, top of the, what's called top of the funnel marketing.
Those parents that know there's something going on, they've heard the school talking about it, or they've seen an influencer online. They're trying to find those parents now through Instagram and Reddit and TikTok and school promotion and so on. That means that the product advancements that we're doing in the business are much more about simplicity, beautiful experiences. You know, we know your child, just leave it with us and we'll let you know if you need to do something. It's kind of low configuration, easy to deploy. That's the real emphasis in that business. If you've used, if any of the people on the call have used Qustodio, you would have seen substantial changes in the UX of that product over the last 12 or 18 months. Heaps to go. We're getting so much learning out of the experience of the 100,000 parents from U.S.
schools that are now using Qustodio. We're now tuning the product to deal with their slightly different requirements. In particular, the content strategy in the U.S. customer base is working incredibly well. I think there's, like I said, I think there's huge upside in that Qustodio business. Upside that if we get it right, we can actually be cash flow neutral growth in that business with the way that the cost of acquisitions perform in that business, again, supported by our B2B2C stuff. On the other product developments, I mean, we're working really hard to layer new data analytics and AI tools in our platform. They're doing really well. Millions of dollars of ARR have now come from products that we've developed in the last 12 - 15 months. The key thing in my view, I'll hand over to Crispin, but actually in the sector, unmute yourself, Crispin.
The key opportunity I think we have is getting all of our products into that U.K. market. At the moment, they're essentially selling two. They've got monitor and filtering. By the middle of next year, they'll have monitor, classroom management, filtering, EdTech Insights, Qustodio, and hopefully any new other products that we're about to launch. I'm really pumped about what's going to happen in the U.K. I'm pressing my product management teams hard until I'm red in the face to get that product to them as soon as I can. Anything you want to add to that, Crispin?
Yeah, in terms of the product per customer mix today globally, it's at 2.2. Tim just described the number of products that are now licensable, which is six. Equally, the contribution from upsell and cross-sell as a percentage of total ARR in FY 2025 was 27%. There's, you know, beyond the growth in new customer logos in the U.S. with only 16% today. Tim talked about the levers we have, but the opportunity to drive additional products into our customer base. To your original question, to increase, you know, the ARPU per student is material with, you know, the products that are coming down the line. Just reinforcing what Tim said, the product unification story for the U.K. is materially exciting for us. Just to see that team being armed with the, you know, the platform that we succeed so well in the U.S. is really exciting.
Is there much baked into that FY 2026 revenue guidance for some of the product growth into the U.K. as you launch those, or are you staying pretty conservative there?
It's pretty conservative. I don't expect that to have a material impact until probably the subsequent year.
Okay, great. Another one from me, just on slide 12, the one with the U.S. K-12 share across your top 10 states. That was really good. I think it's an average of 36% across those top 10 in terms of your share. Just on some of the recent deals, so Ohio and Pennsylvania, is there potential to reach kind of those similar penetration levels in those states over time, or are there sort of limiting factors and other things? Just interested in your views there.
Crispin, you want to talk to that?
Yeah, certainly, over time, we expect certainly in Ohio, maybe less so in Pennsylvania, to reach the same success and penetration that we've seen in Texas with PASI. The answer is yes.
Okay, great. Maybe just one more, just on the pipeline. I think that was $28 million unweighted and $9 million weighted at June. We're sort of a couple of months post that now. Are you starting to see a conversion of that weighted to signed, and then similarly some of the unweighted flowing into the weighted? Just interested in any trends there that you're able to share with us.
Yeah, that's how it works. We're seeing deal close. We're seeing a strengthening of the, I guess, the weighted versus unweighted as those deals progress through the pipeline. Yeah, all heading in the right direction.
Fantastic. That's it for me. Thanks, guys.
Thanks, mate.
Thanks, James.
That's it for the questions, Tim. If you want to wrap up.
Okay, cool. Thanks everyone again for your support. I'm looking forward to seeing everyone on a roadshow that we just highlighted at the thank you slide there. I think that's in September, so I'm not sure. I'll see many of you in a couple of weeks. Of course, looking forward to talking cash flow, big cash receipts in the October foresee. I'll see you all very soon. Thanks again.
Thanks, everyone.
Thanks, everyone.