I built this because I needed it myself.

I'm Kester. I'm a parent, I'm British, and a few years ago I moved my family from the UK to Texas. My son's in marching band, his college applications are around the corner, and somewhere along the way I realized I had no idea what I was doing.

In the UK, the cost of university is roughly a tenth of what it is here. The application process is shorter. The vocabulary is different. The first time someone told me a private college counselor could cost $15,000, I genuinely thought they were joking. They weren't.

The deeper I dug, the more I noticed two systems running in parallel. Families who can pay $15,000 get a person who answers their texts, reads their essays, walks them through financial aid, picks target schools that fit, and quietly knows which scholarships their kid is auto-qualified for. Families who can't pay get a school counselor with 350 other students, a stack of PDFs, and Google.

The information is all out there. Common Data Sets are public. FAFSA is public. Scholarship databases exist. The College Scorecard has earnings data. But you have to know what to look for, where it lives, and how to read it. That's what the $15,000 buys — not secret information, just a guide who has done it before.

So I started building one for myself. A roadmap that knew where I was. A research report that pulled the right numbers. A scholarship finder that actually surfaced the ones our family qualified for. The more I built, the more obvious it became that every other parent I talked to was in the same boat — just quieter about it.

KidToCollege is that tool, opened up. Everything a $15,000 counselor does — research, essay help, deadlines, scholarships, the awkward financial aid math — for free, for any family that wants it.

Free, no signup wall. The privacy policy covers what we do and don't do with data.

If it helps you, that's the whole point. If something's broken or you wish it did something it doesn't, tell me — I read everything that comes in.

— Kester