Frequently asked questions
Contents
1. The basics
What this is, and who it is for.
What is GradLaunch?
A career and college platform for high school students, college students, and the school staff who support them. Students get a career path they build by talking rather than by pressing a button, a resume editor that scores against applicant tracking systems, cover letters, and a college application hub with deadlines, essays, recommenders, activities and scholarships in one place. Counselors get a dashboard ranked by who is closest to missing something.
Is it for students, or for schools?
Both, and they buy differently. A student or family can sign up and use it on their own. A school or district buys it for everyone, brands it, and gets the counselor side. A student whose school pays never sees a price anywhere in the product.
Is it only for students applying to four-year colleges?
No. We ask what a student is actually planning: college, trade school, apprenticeship, military, or straight to work. The product follows that answer. A student who is not heading to college does not get a college applications tab shouting at them about deadlines.
Do I need my school to use it?
No. Individual accounts work exactly the same on the student side. What you do not get without a school is the parts that need one behind them: classroom assignments, school events, and a counselor watching your caseload.
2. Students
What is free, what is paid, and what happens if you stop paying.
What do I get for free?
Everything that holds a deadline, uncapped: your whole college list, its checklists, recommenders, activities and scholarships. The AI is metered rather than withheld - 3 chats at a time, 5 minutes of voice a month, 3 resume asks a week, 2 cover letters a month, a career path 3 stages deep, and your ATS score. No card.
What is not on the free plan?
The judgement calls and the conveniences: how well a college fits you, what it would actually cost you after aid, the six-part breakdown behind your ATS score, a resume saved to your account, a writing style the AI follows, connected Google or Microsoft accounts, and picking the voice that talks back. The Chrome extension is Pro too.
What happens when I hit a free limit?
The tool tells you which limit it was and when it resets, and nothing you have written is touched. Weekly limits reset on Monday, monthly ones on the first of the month. Limits only ever apply to what the AI will do next, never to work that already exists.
What does the paid plan cost?
$5 a month, or $39 a year, which is about a third less. Pro is the free plan with every ceiling removed: unlimited chats and voice, the long chat memory, unlimited resume coaching, match scores and cost estimates, a saved resume, connected accounts, and the Chrome extension. There is a 14-day free trial, and nothing is charged until it ends. You can cancel at any time and keep everything you have written.
My school gives us GradLaunch. Should I pay for anything?
No. If your school or district has a contract, you already have everything on the paid plan and you should never be asked for a card. If you are being shown a price anyway, that is a bug. Tell us and we will fix it.
What happens to my work if I cancel, or if my school's contract ends?
It stays yours. You drop to the free tier and every essay, college list, resume and draft you have written is still there. Nothing is deleted for non-payment.
3. The AI, and academic integrity
The line we hold on essays, and why it is not negotiable.
Will the AI write my college essay?
No, and it cannot be talked into it. Every essay tool coaches: it asks questions, points at sentences you wrote, checks whether an anecdote earns its space, and counts words. It never returns prose for you to paste. That is enforced in how the tools are built, not just in what we ask the model to do. The coaching tools answer with references to your own sentences rather than with sentences of their own.
Why so strict about it?
Common App's fraud policy names AI-generated content submitted as a student's own work as fraud, and students certify to that at submission. The penalty is not a bad grade: it is account suspension, disclosed to every college on the student's list at once. No essay is worth that, so the product will not put a student anywhere near it.
Are the cost and aid numbers accurate?
They are estimates, and we label them as such wherever they appear. Cost, aid and earnings figures come from federal data that is already a few years old when published, carried forward with an assumed rate, so a college's own net price calculator and later its financial aid letter are the only figures that bind. We also do not calculate anybody's FAFSA: we track whether it has been filed, because missing it is the most expensive mistake a senior makes, but we are not connected to the form.
Do you find scholarships for students?
No, and we will not pretend to. We track the ones a student finds, capture them from the page with the Chrome extension, and warn when one is about to close. The scholarships screen also points at where the money actually is, best odds first: their counselor's list, the colleges on their list, employers and local clubs, and their state agency, with the national databases last because every student in the country is already on them.
So what does the AI actually do for an essay?
It interviews you to find the story, triages which drafts are furthest from done, points out where you are explaining instead of showing, flags a paragraph that could be about anyone, checks your word count against the real limit, and tells you when a draft is finished. The words stay yours.
Do you train AI models on student work?
No. We do not sell student data and we do not use student writing to train models.
4. Schools and districts
How buying works, and what it costs.
How much does it cost for a school or district?
It depends on your district, so we quote it rather than publish one figure. There is no base package: you pick the features you want for your students, and the price is per student for the full school year against that set. It also moves with enrolment, campuses, contract length, and what your roster and SSO setup needs. Click Get a quote, tell us your enrolment, and you get a real figure back rather than a calendar invite.
What if we need something you have not built?
Describe it in the quote form and it is priced with everything else. A district that needs a report, a field or an integration nobody else has asked for is a normal conversation, not a reason to say no.
Do we have to sit through a demo to get a price?
No. That is the part of K-12 procurement everyone complains about. Fill in the quote form and we come back with a written number against your enrolment. If you then want to see the product, we are happy to, but the price does not depend on it.
Can we pay by purchase order?
Yes, and most do. We invoice annually against your PO on your terms, usually Net-30. There is no credit card and no automatic renewal you have to remember to stop.
Can we start with one campus?
Yes. Districts often pilot at one high school and add campuses at renewal, and the quote is written for the campuses you start with rather than the whole district.
What happens if our invoice runs late?
Nothing switches off. An outstanding invoice is a phone call with your business office, not a reason to take a college application tracker away from a senior in October.
What can counselors see?
Their caseload, ranked by who is closest to missing something: deadlines, recommendation requests nobody has answered, and whether an essay is progressing. They can see that a personal statement is sitting at 80 words in November. They cannot read a word of it.
5. Privacy and data
Whose data it is, and what we will sign.
Who owns student data?
The student and the school. We do not sell it, we do not rent it to advertisers, and we do not use student work to train models.
How is student data actually secured?
Encrypted in transit and at rest. Tokens for connected Google and Microsoft accounts are encrypted with AES-256-GCM before they are stored, so a leaked row is not a usable account. Staff access is authorised on the server against the school a person belongs to, not hidden in the interface. Our security page lists the controls, and the things we have not finished yet.
Will you sign our data privacy agreement?
Yes. Send us your DPA, including a New York Ed Law 2-d rider or a state student-privacy addendum, and we will work through it with you before anything is signed.
Do parents get any say?
Yes. Students are minors and a parent can ask us what we hold about their child and have it deleted, through the school or directly.
Where does student work go when AI features are used?
Text a student chooses to send to a coaching tool is sent to our AI provider to produce that response, and nothing else. Coursework pulled in from a connected Google Classroom account is not sent to an AI provider at all.
6. The Chrome extension
What it reads, and when.
What is the extension for?
It puts GradLaunch on the page you are already looking at: a job posting you want scored against your profile, an application form to fill, or a college's admissions page whose deadline you are trying to confirm. It is the same account and the same data as the website.
Is the Chrome extension free?
No. The extension is part of Pro ($5 a month or $39 a year). There is a 14-day free trial, and nothing is charged until it ends. If your school provides GradLaunch, you already have it and should not pay. Free accounts still get the full college list and deadlines on the website.
Does it read every page I visit?
No. It reads a page when you press a button, either Sync on a job posting or Read this page on a college site, and not before. It does not run in the background collecting what you browse.
Why does it ask for permission on a college website?
Because it does not hold standing access to the whole web. Chrome grants access to the tab you invoked it on and takes that access back as soon as the tab navigates, so when you walk from a college's homepage to their deadlines page, the extension asks for that one site rather than for every site.
It set a deadline for a college. Can I trust that date?
Only once you have confirmed it. Nobody publishes application deadlines as open data, so a date we prefilled from the application round is marked unconfirmed until you check it. When the extension finds dates on a college's own page it offers them with the sentence they came from and waits for you to say which one is right. It never sets a date on its own.
Still deciding?
Students start free with no card. Schools get a written quote against their own enrolment, usually the same day.