Shoving Discord into Belgian students' grading system: Smartschool Chat grew 9x in two months, but only 600 people

Smartschool Chat is a Chrome extension that works only on smartschool.be, the school platform Flemish secondary students have open every day in Belgium, and puts a Discord-style chat room right on the page. On the first day of school in Sep 1 it had only 67 users. In Nov it rose to 1 615 and then fell back to 523 within a week. It doesn't charge and the numbers are small. What's worth watching is two things: how its users got there, and whether "doing social inside a platform students are forced to keep open all day" can work.

"You're already in Smartschool all day"

The store listing opens like this (Dutch, translated below):

"You're already in Smartschool all day. Grades, homework, official notices. But wanting to ask a classmate a quick question or send a meme means switching to another app. Smartschool Chat puts the chat right on the page. Click Chat and you're with your classmates. No new tab, no separate password: your Smartschool account is linked automatically."

Smartschool is the school platform most primary and secondary schools in Flanders use. Grades, homework and teacher notices all live there, and students keep it open on school computers all day. The platform's built-in "berichten" (messages) works like email, for teachers sending notices, not group chat. Students actually chat on WhatsApp, Snapchat and Discord, but pulling out a phone in class or opening Discord on school computers is inconvenient.

The extension sat in exactly this gap. The author, David Tanasescu, listed it in 2026 May 24, and in Sep 11 he shipped the 1.2.0 version, which is the one in the store now.

What it actually does

The features are largely copied from Discord, with a few details added for classroom use:

• Channels: #huiswerk-hulp (homework help), #examens, #memes, #gaming, with visibility of who is online
• DMs and groups, with drag-in support for images, videos and files, plus GIFs, stickers and custom emoji
• Voice messages auto-transcribed to text. The store page says it plainly: "In class? Just read it."
• Four always-on voice channels, with screen sharing and cameras
• Polls and search filtered by person, channel and time
• Profile pages, XP, levels and a leaderboard, with Spotify linking so classmates can see what you're listening to
• Human moderation team plus automatic filtering, with muting and bans, and an appeal process if you're penalized by mistake

On privacy, it says it reads only three things: the user's Smartschool ID, name and avatar, used for sign-in without registration. Chat content is stored on the author's own server, chat.davidtanasescu.com. It's free, with no in-app purchases, and the official site is just a login page.

Where the 600 users came from

Not social media. TikTok searches for "smartschool chat" and "smartschool extensie" turn up no relevant videos. Nobody has mentioned it on X in the past six months, and neither Reddit nor Belgian media have written about it.

It's the author's own extension portfolio. Under the same website and email, he has three other Smartschool extensions in the store:

The largest, Grid, is a grade-percentage calculator, and its approach is direct: the title says "Smarter Smartschool alternatief", and the first line of the description says a popular extension called Smarter Smartschool has been pulled from the store, and Grid is its safe, open-source replacement. It caught the search traffic another extension left behind. In August 2026 he created a GitHub repo with four folders, chat, grid, score-improver and tweaks, clearly meant as one suite.

Chat's description says it "works together with supported Smartschool extensions." In the store's related-extensions list, Grid's page lists Chat in position #10, and the biggest rival, Smartschool++, lists it at #5. Fewer than 20 extensions in the store are called Smartschool, so any new one is almost guaranteed visibility. That means Chat's exposure most likely came from the 15k students who had installed his tool extensions (inference: I did not verify whether the extension interface directly recommends Chat).

Then there's the school start. 1 people before the Sep 67 school start, and after the Sep 11 update plus the start of school, it reached 615 within two months. It dipped in early November, which lines up with Flanders' autumn break (late October to early November). Whether that's seasonal or a retention problem, I can't tell yet.

Who it's competing with

Rival Smartschool++ is 60x its size and already has chat. Chat has more features, but a chat product doesn't compete on features. It competes on "are my classmates all here?" 600 people are spread across hundreds of schools throughout Flanders, so it's hard to build density in any single class.

The sword hanging overhead

In 2026 Jun 18, Belgium's public broadcaster VRT reported that Smartschool had sent warnings to all schools, telling students and parents to uninstall an unofficial extension called "Smartschool Radar" immediately, claiming it read personal data and sent it to unknown external servers. Chat reads far less, but what it does, letting minors privately chat inside a school platform with chat logs stored on a third-party server, is exactly what schools and platforms get most nervous about. One platform page redesign, or one warning letter of the same kind, could kill this extension overnight. The author spends a long stretch of the description on moderation and appeals, which suggests he knows this too.

Also, the author's main job is elsewhere: his X bio lists him as CTO of an AI startup (ZeroLeaks), and he also runs a freelance studio. Chat is a free side project.

If it were you

One-line verdict: The approach is interesting, but this product isn't worth chasing. What's worth learning is its distribution method, not the chat idea.

Who it suits: People who already build extensions for a campus platform or internal enterprise system and have built an audience of the same users.

Who it doesn't suit: People hoping to make money from it (minors' social apps have almost no paying path), people without moderation capacity, and people with no existing users.

How to do it: Don't build a "Discord inside Smartschool." The better thing to copy is a two-step playbook. First, find a closed platform students or staff are forced to keep open all day (in the US, Canvas and Schoology; in the Netherlands, Magister and Somtoday), and use tool extensions (grade calculators, interface tweaks, the name of a popular extension that got pulled) to build an audience of that same group. Then use the store's related-extensions list and cross-promotion between your extensions to move people to the product you actually want. For social, build by school and by class. Reach density in one school before spreading thin across the country.

How to acquire users: Claim the platform name in store search. Capture the traffic of popular extensions that got pulled or stopped being maintained. Ship a new version two weeks before the school-start season.

When to move: School-start seasons are the only clear window. The nearer one is the new semester in 2027 1–February, and the bigger one is the September 2027 school start. Have your tool extensions in place two or three months before that.

What would mean I've got it wrong: If Smartschool Chat returns after the autumn break and exceeds 615, with reviews starting to pile up, it means word of mouth inside schools is really turning, and the chat idea itself has potential. If Smartschool or schools start naming and banning unofficial chat extensions, then this route needs caution on any campus platform.