Procare just bought Playground. Here's what that actually means for your center.
On September 14, 2026, Procare Solutions announced it has acquired Playground.
If you use either one, you probably found out from a cheerful email. Nothing changes today. Both companies have said as much, and that's true: your logins still work, your staff still check children in the same way, and your invoices go out Friday like they always do.
We want to write about this honestly, because we compete with both companies and you should weigh what we say accordingly. But the news is worth understanding, and most of the coverage you'll see is written for investors rather than for directors.
What happened
Procare has been in childcare software for more than thirty years and says it serves over 40,000 centers. Playground is much younger, founded in New York by Daniel Andrews, Josh Andrews and Sasha Reiss, and has grown to more than 5,000 programs on the strength of a clean interface, fast setup, and support that people actually liked. It also built Camber, an AI assistant for childcare operations.
Playground's whole reason for existing, for a lot of the directors who switched to it, was that it wasn't Procare. That's not a knock on Procare. It's just what the choice looked like from a director's desk: the established system with the deep feature set and the legacy feel, or the newer one that your teachers could learn in an afternoon.
As of today, those are the same company. Financial terms weren't disclosed.
Who actually owns Procare
This part matters more than the headline, and it's easy to miss.
Procare is not an independent company. It's a business unit of Roper Technologies, a publicly traded company on the Nasdaq. Roper announced its agreement to acquire Procare on January 25, 2024, at a net purchase price of approximately $1.75 billion, or roughly $1.86 billion in enterprise value. The deal closed the following month. Procare's previous owners were the private equity firms Warburg Pincus and TA Associates.
Roper was direct about the reasoning in its own announcement. Its president and CEO at the time, Neil Hunn, described Procare as a business with niche market leadership, mission-critical software, a high recurring revenue mix, and excellent cash conversion, and framed the purchase as part of a strategy focused on long-term cash flow compounding. The release also stated that Roper expects Procare to deliver long-term mid-teens organic revenue growth.
That last phrase is worth sitting with. Organic growth is growth from the business as it already exists — from selling more, and from charging more. That growth target does not, by itself, tell us whether prices will rise: growth can also come from new customers, additional products, or greater usage. Directors should ask how their own contracts may be affected. We're not suggesting anything improper. It's a publicly stated goal, in a public document, and it's simply useful for a director to know what the goal is.
What may change, and what to watch
We want to be careful here, because we're a competitor and it would be easy to write something alarming. So: none of the following is a prediction. These are the things that can shift after an acquisition like this, and they're the things worth keeping an eye on.
Pricing may move at renewal. If your Playground agreement charges per child, your bill can grow with enrollment even before any rate change. If your rate isn't contractually locked, the renewal letter is where you'd first see a difference.
Support may get consolidated. Playground's support was one of the most-praised things about it. When two companies merge, two support organizations often become one. If response times were part of why you chose Playground, that's a reasonable thing to monitor.
The roadmap may slow. Not because anyone stops caring. Integration work consumes real engineering time, and features promised in a sales call end up competing with the work of merging two platforms.
The product may change shape rather than disappear. One possibility is that the newer product becomes an interface to shared systems. No such change has been announced for Playground.
Again: none of this is guaranteed, and some of it may never happen. Procare has acquired other childcare products before — SchoolLeader in 2018, for instance. That announcement welcomed SchoolLeader into Procare's family of products. Playground's founders may do good work inside a larger company, and the combined resources are real. Procare said explicitly that existing customers of both products should expect no immediate changes and need take no action. We have no reason to doubt that.
But "nothing changes today" is a statement about today, not a guarantee about every future renewal.
What to actually do
Don't switch anything this week. A panic migration in the middle of a school year is its own kind of expensive.
Do put a note in your calendar for sixty days before your renewal date, and between now and then, ask your rep four questions in writing:
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What is my price at renewal, and what is it the year after?
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Is my per-child rate locked, or does it move with enrollment?
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Who answers my support calls in six months, and what's the target response time?
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If the platforms merge, does my data come with me, and in what format?
Get the answers in email, not on a call. A vendor who can answer those plainly is a vendor worth staying with.
And regardless of who you use: confirm that you can export your own roster, family records, balances, and daily report history without filing a support ticket. That's your data. Your ability to leave is the only real leverage you have, and it's worth checking while you're not using it.
Where we stand
We should be straightforward about our position, since you can see it coming.
Bloomily is independent. We're not owned by a public company, a private equity firm, or a rollup, and we're not building toward a quarterly number. We publish our pricing on the website: free for licensed home daycares up to 18 children; Standard is $99 a month per location, flat, with unlimited children and every feature. Home includes the core tools; advanced features are on Standard. See the full plan comparison. Your price is locked the day you join. It doesn't move when your enrollment does.
When you call, a person picks up. When you switch, we move your roster, families, staff, and balances over, included on every plan. The timeline depends on the data you are bringing with you.
We built the product to work the same way in July as it does in October, so programs running both a school year and a summer camp aren't handed a second system every June.
We'd rather earn your business on that than on somebody else's bad week. If you're on Playground and you're happy, stay. It's a good product built by capable people, and today's news doesn't change what it does for you tomorrow. But if you'd like to see the alternative before your renewal comes around, we'll show you the whole thing, price included, in about twenty minutes.
Book a walkthrough, or just email us. We'll send the comparison either way.
Sources
- Procare Solutions acquisition announcement, September 14, 2026. Acquisition, customer counts, founders, Camber, and the no-immediate-changes statement.
- Roper Technologies: agreement to acquire Procare, January 25, 2024. Net purchase price and organic revenue growth expectation.
- Roper Technologies, March 31, 2024 Form 10-Q, business acquisitions note. February 26, 2024 closing date, purchase price, and tax benefit.
- Reuters: Roper to buy Procare for $1.75 billion, January 25, 2024. Enterprise value and previous owners.
- Procare Software acquisition of SchoolLeader, May 8, 2018.
- Bloomily pricing and plan comparison, checked September 14, 2026.