Simple, one-time pricing
No subscription, no recurring charges. Pay once for full access, and top up credits only if you need them.
Independent college advisors typically charge $1,500–$5,000+ for this kind of guidance.
- Personalized college list — reach, match, and safety schools
- Plan together — your family can build plans, comment on schools, chat and tick off deadlines, all on one account. One purchase covers everyone.
- Deep-dive analysis for every school on your list
- Financial aid and scholarship estimates
- Engagement strategy per school
- Unlimited saves, shares, and PDF exports
- Access doesn’t expire
- No limit on the number of plans — credits are the only limit
- 2,000,000 SchoolScout credits included — enough for several full research cycles
Payments processed securely by Stripe.
Who pays for SchoolScout
You do, and no one else. No college, lender or recruiter pays to appear in your list, and we never sell your profile, essays or college list, or share them with a college, lender or recruiter.
Some free college-search sites are paid by colleges to feature them, or pass student information to colleges, lenders or military recruiters as leads. That is how they stay free. Because the family pays instead, the list is built around the student and nothing else.
How credits work
Building your list, running deep-dive analysis, and chatting with SchoolScout all use credits. A full research cycle across your list — building it, deep-diving each school, and refining it through chat — typically runs about 250,000 credits, so your $50 access and its 2,000,000 credits cover around eight cycles for most students. A single Deep Dive, Aid & Scholarships or How to Engage run for one school uses about 3,000. Credits are only spent while you’re actively using the tool; there’s no monthly fee.
Need more credits?
If you run out, top up anytime from your account page — no need to repurchase access.
Questions
Is this a subscription?
No. The $50 is a one-time payment for full access. You only pay again if you choose to top up credits.
What do credits pay for?
Building and updating your plan, deep-dive analysis, and chat with SchoolScout. Browsing schools and viewing school pages doesn’t use credits.
Can I get a refund?
Yes. If you haven’t built a plan yet, email us and we’ll refund you in full. Once a plan is built the research has already run, so we can’t refund it automatically — but tell us what went wrong and we’ll do our best to make it right. For this or any other billing question, reach us at contact@schoolscout.college.