How we make money.

Right now

Zero revenue. Built on time, not money.

KidToCollege has no investors, no ads, no affiliate links, no “premium tier” — and no income. It was built by one Texas dad in the evenings, on the theory that someone needed to make a free, honest college admissions tool and nobody else was going to do it.

The site is hosted on Vercel (~$20/mo), the database is Supabase's free tier, the AI runs on a personal Anthropic API budget. So the costs are small and the runway is “until I get bored or it works.”

Eventually

A narrow list of affiliate links, all disclosed.

If the site grows, we'll need to fund it somehow. The plan is the same one Martin Lewis used at MoneySavingExpert and Wirecutter used at the NYT: be editorially honest, recommend the best thing — paid or free — and earn a small commission only on products we would recommend regardless.

The narrow set we'd consider, eventually:

• Books via Amazon Associates — Fiske Guide, Princeton Review, Jeff Selingo, Frank Bruni. These help families understand the system and we'd recommend them with or without the commission.
• Paid test prep (Magoosh, UWorld) as the disclosed “if Khan Academy isn't a fit” alternative. Khan Academy is free and excellent and will always be the recommended-first option.
• Paid tutoring (Wyzant) as the disclosed alternative to free peer tutoring via Schoolhouse.world. Free option named first on the same page.
• Scholarship platforms (Bold.org) as a search extension to our own scholarship database — only if they continue to be free for students and useful.

Every one of these would be disclosed inline, marked with an asterisk, with a free alternative linked on the same page. None are live today.

Never

The hard lines.

The full list is in the Promise. Highlights: no money from colleges, ever. No private student loan affiliate links, ever. No selling your data, ever. No paywalls on the tools that matter.

The forcing function

We'll publish the numbers.

When (and if) we start taking affiliate revenue, we'll publish a quarterly affiliate revenue report — the amounts, by category, like Patreon creators do. Anyone can see exactly where the money came from. This is the only way to keep us honest as the site grows.