FAQ
Top questions, answered.
Pricing, agent behavior, privacy, accessibility, and where academic-honesty lines sit. Search below or jump to a category.
28 questions across 5 categories
Pricing & refunds
Plans, what each tier includes, and how refunds work.
What does Scaffolding cost?#
Three tiers. Free: 100 AI thoughts on signup, no credit card, on a faster, lighter AI. Scaffolding Plus: $19 one-time for a year of access — 450 AI thoughts running the full committee on our sharper engine, the budget option for a full applicant. Scaffolding Pass: $29 one-time for a year of access — 700 AI thoughts on the same sharper engine, plus per-school Readiness Signals, for multi-school applicants. $9 buys 50 more thoughts on either Plus or Pass; top-ups run on whichever engine your tier uses. Plus and Pass are one-time payments — no subscription, no auto-renew.
What counts as a thought?#
One thought is one piece of agent feedback — a single critique from the senior editor, one Socratic question, one structural note. A typical First Read produces about ten thoughts. The 700 included with the Pass cover a multi-school applicant with revisions. The 100 free thoughts cover roughly ten First Read sessions — enough to see if Scaffolding catches things you missed.
What is the difference between Free, Plus, and the Pass?#
Same agents, same five-critic committee, same Socratic revision loop, same Synthesizer Report on every tier. The free tier runs them on a faster, lighter AI that finds the same issues but reads them with a little less editorial bite; Plus and the Pass both run the full committee on our sharper engine. Free is 100 thoughts, one-time, no card. Plus is $19 a year for 450 thoughts — the budget option for a full applicant. Pass is $29 a year for 700 thoughts plus per-school Readiness Signals — for multi-school applicants. Plus and Pass holders get $9 / 50-thought top-ups; both auto-renew only if you opt in.
Will my Pass auto-renew?#
No. Plus and the Pass are one-time payments — pay once, get a full year of access, and the relationship ends. No subscription, no card on file, no auto-renew. If you want another year next admissions cycle, you actively re-purchase. We do this so you never get a surprise $99 charge in your freshman dorm because you forgot you signed up.
Can I get a refund?#
Within three days of purchase, full refund — no questions, even if you have used it. Within seven days, full refund if you have not spent any thoughts. After that, the Pass is non-refundable. Email support@scaffolding.com to start a refund. The free tier has nothing to refund.
Is there a free trial?#
Yes — the free tier itself is the trial. 100 AI thoughts on signup, no credit card. Run a couple full First Reads, see what the committee finds, decide if the Pass is worth $99 to you. Thoughts do not refresh — once they are used they are used.
Do my thoughts expire or roll over?#
Your thoughts are a one-time allotment that lasts the full year of access that comes with your tier — they do not reset monthly, and unused thoughts stay available until your year ends. Once a thought is spent it is gone, and it does not roll over into a new year. Free-tier thoughts work the same way: 100 on signup, no refresh.
Can I use a counselor referral code?#
Yes. If your counselor is in the Scaffolding Counselor Circle they have a code that gives you 20% off the Pass. Enter it at checkout. Free tier sign-ups do not need a code.
How it works
What the agents do, what a Report looks like, what revision feels like.
What does Scaffolding actually do?#
Scaffolding audits your application as one connected system — essays, activities, transcript, profile — for cross-section coherence. It is not a grammar checker or an essay editor. The output is a Report from a committee of agents that disagree with each other, ranked into the top three issues to fix first.
Who are the agents?#
Five core critics in V1: EC Storyline Detective, Harsh Ivy Adcom, Empathetic Counselor, Structure Engineer, and Coherence Cartographer. Each has a published bias label so you know what they over-index on. A Synthesizer agent merges their outputs into the ranked Report.
What is a First Read?#
The committee reads your application end-to-end and produces a single Report with the top three issues. The agents fan out in parallel; the Report includes per-agent verdicts, disagreements when the committee splits, and the agents-agreeing count for each issue.
What is a Socratic revision session?#
After the Report, you pick one priority issue. The Socratic agent asks you a single specific question that quotes your own writing — never a rewrite. You answer; it asks the next question; up to 5 turns or until your direction is clear. The point is for you to reach the revision yourself.
Does Scaffolding write my essay for me?#
No. The Voice Covenant is enforced server-side: during Socratic revision the agent can only ask questions, never propose prose. The one exception is the Advanced-tier "Suggest alternatives" path on a sentence you select, where you must explicitly Accept each alternative — and your AI percentage is capped at 60% before the system blocks further suggestions.
How is Scaffolding different from an essay editor or ChatGPT?#
An essay editor — human or a chatbot like ChatGPT — works one essay at a time and tends to rewrite your sentences. Scaffolding does neither. It audits your whole application as one connected system — essays, activities, transcript, profile — for coherence, and a committee of five critics that disagree with each other ranks the top three issues to fix first. In the default flow it never writes prose for you: the Voice Covenant keeps the agents asking Socratic questions instead of replacing your words.
What do I need to upload for a review?#
Your application materials: personal statement and supplemental essays, your activities list, transcript text, and the 11-dimension profile you fill out at signup, plus the schools you are targeting. You do not need everything at once — the committee reads whatever you have given it, and a First Read gets more useful as your application fills in.
Can Scaffolding review my supplemental and "Why Us" essays?#
Yes. Supplements are where coherence problems show up most, so the committee reads them alongside your personal statement and activities. The 700 thoughts in the Pass are sized for a multi-school applicant with room for revisions.
Who is Scaffolding for?#
Students applying to selective colleges who want a hard, structured read of their whole application before they submit — not a proofread. It is most useful once you have drafts of your essays and a filled-in activities list, so the committee has a real application to audit. Counselors also use it with their students through the Counselor Circle.
Privacy & data
What we collect, what we train on, how long we keep things.
What data does Scaffolding collect?#
The application data you give us: essays, activities, transcript text, the 11-dimension profile, the schools you target. Subscription state from Stripe. Auth metadata from Supabase. We do not buy lists, scrape social profiles, or pull from data brokers.
Do you sell my data?#
No. We do not sell your application data, your essays, or your account information to anyone, and we do not share it with data brokers or advertisers. The only third parties that touch your data are the processors that make the product run — Stripe for payments, Supabase for auth and storage, and the AI provider that runs the agents — each handling only what its job requires. Full details are in the Privacy Policy.
Do you train AI models on my essays?#
Only if you opt in. Training data uses the rejection-corpus only for students who explicitly granted corpus_opt_in consent (separate from the Terms — never bundled). You can revoke this at any time from /account/consent and any future training runs exclude your data.
How long do you keep my data?#
Active accounts retain everything you submitted as long as the account exists. After deletion, identifiable data is hard-deleted within 30 days; backups are purged within 90 days. Per-table retention details are in the Privacy Policy.
Can I delete my account?#
Yes. Open /account/data and click Delete account. We send a confirmation email and revoke access immediately; the hard-delete runs after the 30-day retention window so accidental clicks are recoverable.
Accessibility
WCAG conformance, motion, screen reader support.
Is Scaffolding accessible?#
Every UI surface targets WCAG 2.1 AA. Lighthouse and axe-core run on every PR; failures block merge. If you find an a11y issue, email support@scaffolding.com and we treat it as a high-priority bug.
What if I prefer reduced motion?#
We honor prefers-reduced-motion: reduce. Animated surfaces (the Committee Deliberation ceremony, the Readiness Badge medallion, the Reflection Lock fade-ins) all degrade to cross-fades or static states — no spinning, no pulsing, no slide transitions.
Does Scaffolding work with screen readers?#
Yes. Live regions announce streaming content (Socratic questions, Committee progress); meters and progress bars expose ARIA values; agent quotes carry alt text on share cards. The Socratic conversation log uses role="log" + aria-live="polite" so new questions arrive without preempting your typing.
Academic honesty
How Scaffolding fits inside school policies on AI assistance.
Is using Scaffolding cheating?#
It depends on the school's policy. Scaffolding never writes your essay for you in the default flow — it audits and asks Socratic questions. If your target school prohibits any AI assistance, do not use the Advanced-tier prose suggestions; the diagnostic Report and Socratic loop work without generating prose. We honor per-school AI-tool policies via the allows_ai_critique flag and hide schools that opt out.
What is the "Voice Covenant"?#
Our binding commitment that during Socratic revision the agent only asks questions — never writes replacement prose for you. It is enforced server-side via a validator that scans every Socratic output for replacement-prose patterns ("Try this:", "Rewrite as:", quoted blocks longer than two lines) and refuses to deliver outputs that violate it.
Will my school find out I used Scaffolding?#
We do not contact schools about your usage and we do not include any "Scaffolding-reviewed" markers in your application. The decision to disclose AI tool usage to a school is yours; we publish a Detection-Safe Mode roadmap separately for students whose schools require disclosure of AI assistance.