SubSidekick Shut Down: How to Keep Getting Frontline Jobs Fast in 2026

After 16 years and, by their own count, more than 47 million job alerts, SubSidekick has shut down. For a lot of substitute teachers that service was the difference between seeing a job and getting it, so its closure left a real gap.

If you're searching for a replacement, here's an honest look at what you actually lost, what Frontline's own tools do, and what your options are.

What SubSidekick actually did

Two things, and it's worth separating them, because they're what any replacement has to cover:

• Fast alerts. It watched your Frontline Absence Management account continuously and told you about a new job right away, rather than whenever you next happened to open an app.
• Quick booking. Once you knew about a job, it got you to accepting it in as few taps as possible.

Everything else was convenience. Those two are the reason it mattered, because of a fact that hasn't changed: desirable Frontline jobs are frequently gone within a minute of being posted. Speed is the whole game.

Option 1: Frontline's own mobile app

If your district uses Frontline Absence Management, the official Frontline Education app is the baseline, and it's free. It shows available jobs, lets you view details, accept or reject, filter and sort, and see your scheduled assignments. It can also send notifications about available jobs.

For a lot of subs, that's genuinely enough — particularly if your district posts jobs steadily and you aren't competing for a handful of desirable assignments.

Where subs tend to run into trouble is timing and precision. Notification behavior varies by district configuration and device, and the alerts aren't filtered as narrowly as most subs would like — so you either get pinged about jobs you'd never take, or you find yourself opening the app repeatedly to check for the ones you would.

Option 2: A third-party alert service

These sit alongside Frontline: you connect your Frontline account, they watch it for you, and they notify you the moment something matching your criteria appears. A few such services exist, with different feature sets and pricing — it's worth checking which ones currently support your district.

Sub Hero is one of them, and since you're reading this on our blog, here's the plain version of what it does:

• Checks your Frontline account every minute, 24 hours a day, and alerts you within seconds of a matching job posting.
• Precise filters — school, district, position, day of week, start and end time, job length — so you only hear about jobs you'd actually take.
• Auto-accept (optional) books a matching job for you automatically, which matters most for the early-morning postings that appear while you're asleep. It only ever acts on filters you set, and it's capped at 5 acceptances per month.

Creating an account is free and doesn't require a credit card. Paid plans are $6.99/month for alerts, filters and one-click booking, or $9.99/month to add auto-accept, both with a 14-day trial. The FAQ covers how credentials are stored and what the service can and can't do with your Frontline account.

Option 3: Marketplaces, if your district uses them

Services like Swing Education, and district systems such as SmartFind Express, Red Rover or willSub, are a different category — they're where the jobs live, not a layer on top of Frontline. If your district posts in Frontline, these don't replace it. They're only relevant if you're willing to pick up assignments from districts that use those systems instead.

How to decide

Ask yourself one question: in the last month, how many jobs did you want and not get because someone else got there first?

If the answer is zero, the Frontline app is fine and you should save your money. If the answer is more than one or two, the problem isn't your diligence — it's that you're competing against whoever happens to be looking at their phone at 5:47 AM. That's the gap SubSidekick filled, and it's the one worth solving.

A note on trust

Any service that watches Frontline for you needs your Frontline login, and you should be skeptical about handing that over. Reasonable questions to ask any provider, including us: How are my credentials stored? What exactly will it do in my account? Can I delete everything, and how? A service that can't answer those plainly doesn't deserve your login.

Ours are answered in the FAQ. Credentials are encrypted with AWS Key Management Service, used only to check for jobs and to book ones matching your own filters, and you can delete your account and stored credentials at any time from Settings.