The ones people actually ask before paying for something like this, answered plainly, including where the answer is no.
You can, and for some things you should. Ask one to explain early decision or to react to a paragraph and it will do a decent job.
The difference is what it knows. A chatbot starts every conversation empty. It has not read your student’s transcript, does not know which courses her school actually offers, has not seen the questionnaire about how she likes to learn, and cannot tell you whether a college’s classroom feels like the one she is thriving in now. Ask it for good-fit colleges and it will produce a reasonable, generic list, the same one it gives everyone, weighted toward whatever is famous.
Mr. Lambert works from a file. 414 colleges are described across roughly thirteen experiential dimensions: intellectual style, how teaching happens, how people make friends, pace, structure, setting, size. Every read is that file against hers. When he says a school suits her, there is something underneath the sentence.
The other difference is that he does not forget. Work done in October is still there in January, and the essay coaching knows what the questionnaire said.
And there is a second person in this. A chatbot is one private session, so it can do nothing about the oldest tension in a college search: a parent with no real idea how it is going, whose only way of finding out is to ask again. Here you each have your own login. Her essays stay hers, and you see how the work is moving and what would help most right now, as much as she chooses to share and no more.
It is not a replacement, and a good counselor is worth more than we are. But a public school counselor may carry several hundred students, and even a private counselor, who can cost thousands of dollars, may have more experience with some schools than others.
That is not a criticism. Good counselors build rapport on a human level and support students during a process that everyone agrees is trying at best. Our goal is to provide students with process scaffolding that reduces anxiety, for students and parents, and promotes discussion around fit rather than rankings.
No, deliberately. We will not give you a percentage, and you should be wary of anyone who does. Nobody outside an admissions office can compute that number, and a confident-sounding one mostly produces anxiety or false comfort.
What you get instead is honest context: how a student might feel academically compared to the school’s admitted class, for example comfortable or challenged, whether a school is a stretch, a target or a likely one for them, and what an early round actually changes. Facts about the pool, not a prediction about your student.
Free finds the schools and the story: school reads and questions, the activities list with Mr. Lambert’s coaching, your personal narrative, and a sample turn of his comments on one essay.
A pass is the drafting: Mr. Lambert coaching your essays through submit, revision by revision, with your student’s whole file in view.
There are four, each one payment that runs to a date: Starter for one essay, an Early Round and a Regular Round for the deadlines they cover, and the Season pass for the whole year. Whatever you pay comes off the next one up, so stepping up costs the difference. Prices and dates are on the pricing page.
15 school reads and 10 questions for Mr. Lambert. A read is counted once per school, so re-opening one you have already read is free forever, and the allowance does not expire.
A linked parent also gets a small allowance of their own — 5 reads and 3 questions — so looking things over never spends what your student still has left.
When it runs out, nothing is taken away. Everything already generated stays readable, and everything free stays free — including your activities list, its coaching, and your personal narrative. What stops is new drafting after that sample turn.
Nothing is taken away. Every essay, draft, activities list and note stays yours to read and export, and the free side of the product keeps working exactly as it did. What stops is new coaching: Mr. Lambert stops writing fresh feedback on the writing.
No pass renews on its own and there is no card on file, so we cannot charge you again without you deciding to. Each one ends on the date it names, and the Season pass runs past the last deadlines to the spring, when offers arrive.
No. The Application Workshop is the student’s private space. A parent account cannot open it, not by clicking and not by knowing the address. That is enforced on the server, not by hiding a link.
A student can choose to share their progress: which essays are underway, how many drafts, when they last worked, and an honest note on how the writing is going. Not a word of the writing itself, and never what an essay is about. It is off unless the student turns it on, and they can turn it off again at any time.
What a parent gets is the Process Update: what would help most right now, so a conversation can be about one specific thing instead of a general "how are the essays coming". A short version can be emailed on Sundays.
No. We use the model providers’ APIs, where inputs are not used to train their models. That is the providers’ own default for API customers, and it is a reason we do not build on the consumer chat products.
Some specifics, because “we take security seriously” is what everyone says:
Transcripts are encrypted where they are stored, with a key that lives outside the code and is never committed, so the stored files do not contain a readable transcript. Each family’s data is walled off from every other family’s. Your student’s essays are private even from you unless they choose to share their progress, which is enforced on the server rather than by hiding a link.
A student can erase their written work from inside the product, and we will delete an account and its data on request.
The privacy policy is the full version, in plain language.
An AI persona with a consistent voice and a set of ground rules: he coaches rather than writes, he has no school to favour, and his feedback is candid but never harsh.
Naming him is also a promise about tone. He talks the way a good counselor would, not like software, and a seventeen-year-old can tell the difference immediately.
No, and it is built not to. He reacts, questions, points at the paragraph that is doing the least work, and says when the real essay starts three paragraphs in. The words stay theirs.
That is a deliberate limit, not a missing feature. An essay a student did not write is worth nothing to them, and increasingly it is obvious.
Not today. A student can set their own target completion date for a school and be reminded of it, but we do not hold each college’s deadlines or requirement checklists, and we would rather say that than imply a to-do system we have not built.
Early rounds are the exception, in one direction: approximate ED and EA windows appear in the early-strategy read, labelled as approximate, with a note to confirm with the school.
Something not answered here? Ask us directly. A real person replies.
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