ScholarDuck is a scholarship search and essay-writing tool for students. Searching is free, a one-time $19 covers one scholarship season of the writing tools, and a parent who links to their child's account can see application status, deadlines and the aid picture — but never the essays themselves.
Two things, and it is worth keeping them apart because only one of them costs anything. The first is a search: your child answers some questions about themselves and gets the scholarships they qualify for, each with its award amount, its deadline and a link to the provider's own page. The second is writing help — drafting an essay, getting it reviewed, and reading a résumé or a recommendation letter back.
What it is not: an application service. Nobody here applies on your child's behalf, and nothing is guaranteed. If you have been circling this category warily, that instinct is correct and it is worth keeping — the Federal Trade Commission's guidance on scholarship and financial-aid scams is a short read, and the line it draws is a good one: you should never have to pay a fee to apply for a scholarship, and nobody can promise you one. Our $19 buys software. It does not buy an application, a place, or an outcome.
On your child's privacy, the specifics live in the privacy policy rather than in a sentence on a marketing page, but two of them are worth stating here because they are the ones parents ask about. Product analytics run only after a student consents to them; students under 16 get none at all, consented or not. And nobody's screen is ever recorded under 18. Those are our own rules, enforced in the code that starts analytics rather than in a policy document.
Nineteen dollars, once, for one scholarship season — 90 days. That is the whole price list.
Finding scholarships never costs anything: the full match list, the whole catalog, no cap on how many your child looks at, sorted by amount and deadline. Their first uploaded document — a resume or a transcript — is read free too, once, and makes the matching sharper. The $19 adds the AI ranking that puts the best fits first with a short reason for each, the writing tools, and analysis of any documents after that first one. It is a single payment rather than a subscription, and there is nothing to cancel.
Two honest footnotes. The AI tools carry fair-use limits, set high enough that ordinary use does not come near them — they exist to stop abuse, not to meter your child. And a pass belongs to the account that bought it: if you want to use the writing tools yourself while helping, buy it on your login rather than inside your child's, or it lands on their account instead of yours.
This is the part worth reading closely, because it is a decision rather than an accident. A linked parent gets a summary of where things stand. A linked parent does not get their child's writing.
Concretely: you see how many applications exist and what state each one is in, any dated deadline falling in the next thirty days, whether the FAFSA has been submitted, a plain-language read on Pell likelihood, and any award letters, laid out side by side so two offers can be compared properly. You do not see the essay text, the interview answers your child gave to build it, or the profile of their writing voice.
We are not being coy about why. An essay is the one place in this process where a seventeen-year-old writes something true about themselves, and knowing a parent can read it changes what gets written. So the boundary is drawn in the server rather than in the interface: the summary above is assembled field by field on our side and handed over as a fixed list, and the essay text is not on that list. It is not hidden behind a setting anyone can toggle.
There is one case where that is different, and it is the one place on this page where we are telling you something you did not ask.
If you start a profile for a child who does not have an account yet, you built it, and while it is unclaimed you can open all of it — there is no second person there whose privacy could be at stake. The moment your child signs in and claims that account, a person exists who did not agree to be read, and your access narrows to the summary above. Nothing gets migrated and nobody has to remember to change a setting: signing in is the change.
One smaller thing in the same spirit: financial information is treated as sensitive on both sides. A parent has to have signed in within the last fifteen minutes to open or edit it, so a session left open on a shared laptop does not hand it to whoever sits down next.
ScholarDuck starts at 13, and between 13 and 15 the AI features stay locked until a parent or guardian is linked to the account. We would rather you heard that from us than discovered it, because it is the one place where the product genuinely needs you.
Under 13 we do not open an account at all. That is our own line rather than a legal minimum, drawn where it is because United States children's privacy law — the rule the FTC calls out in its children's privacy guidance — governs personal information collected online from children under 13, and building for that is a different product than this one.
Between 13 and 15 the account works normally: your child can search, see every match, save scholarships and track deadlines. What waits is the AI — drafting, review, document reads — and it unlocks the moment a family link exists between their account and an adult's. From 16 the features are the same as an adult's, minus screen recording, which is off for every minor.
There are two ways in, depending on who is sitting at the computer.
Either way you end up with your own login and your own password. You are never sharing an account with your child, which is the arrangement that quietly makes all of the boundaries above meaningless.
ScholarDuck is still in beta and open to everyone. If something here is wrong or missing, we would rather hear it than not — that is what this is and isn't, in more detail.
No, and that is deliberate rather than a limitation we plan to remove. A linked parent sees the state of the work — how many applications exist and where each stands, dated deadlines in the next thirty days, FAFSA status, a read on Pell likelihood, and any award letters — but not the essay text, the interview answers behind it, or the writing-voice profile. The one exception is a profile you created for a child who has not signed in yet: while it is unclaimed you built everything on it, and the moment they claim the account your access narrows to the summary.
Nineteen dollars, once, covering one scholarship season of 90 days. Searching for scholarships is free for everyone with no cap on matches, and the first document your child uploads is read free as well — the payment adds AI ranking, the essay writing tools, and document analysis. It is a single payment rather than a subscription, so there is nothing to cancel. A pass belongs to the account that bought it, so if you want to use the writing tools on your own login, buy it there rather than inside your child's account.
Yes, with one condition. The account works normally at 13 to 15 — searching, matches, saved scholarships, deadlines — but the AI features stay locked until a parent or guardian is linked to it. Linking is what unlocks them. Under 13 we do not open an account at all, and from 16 the features match an adult's except that screen recording is off for every minor.
You do not share their account; you get your own and link it. Either your child invites you by email from their Account or Family screen — the invite link is single-use and only works for the address they sent it to — or you create a parent account yourself and set up a profile for them. Parent accounts have to belong to an adult.
No. Nobody applies on your child's behalf and no award is promised. It finds scholarships they qualify for, links to each provider's own page, and helps them write the essays. The FTC's guidance on scholarship scams is a useful line to hold onto here: you should never pay a fee to apply for a scholarship, and nobody can guarantee you one.