What we promise, and what we don’t

Honest Odds reads the academic information you give us and produces a written admissions strategy review: estimated admit odds for the schools on your list, an assessment of how the application is positioned, and a list of things we think are worth doing about it.

The admit rates we cite come from universities’ own published Common Data Set reporting where we have it, and from the model’s general knowledge where we do not. The report tells you which is which, every time, including when we cannot verify that a published figure is still current.

We are not licensed educational consultants, counselors, attorneys, or financial advisers, and using this service does not create a professional advisory relationship. We are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or acting on behalf of any university, the College Board, the Common Application, or any admissions office.

Nothing here is a guarantee of admission, of a scholarship, of financial aid, or of any particular outcome. The numbers we give you are estimates. Admissions decisions turn on institutional priorities, the rest of the applicant pool, and readers’ judgements — none of which any model can see, and none of which are knowable in advance.

We do not write essays. We review, edit, and coach. Submitting work that is not your own violates the policies of every school you would apply to, and we will not help with it.

You are responsible for what you do with the review. That matters most for binding commitments: an Early Decision agreement is a contract with a university, and it cannot be undone because a probability we published turned out badly.

Before acting on anything here — deadlines, testing policies, required materials, financial-aid rules — verify it against the school’s own admissions site. Schools change these, sometimes mid-cycle, and their page is the authority. Ours is not.

You need an account, which is how we keep your review for you and how one free sample stays one per family. Keep your sign-in secure; anything done through your account is treated as done by you.

You must be at least 13 to hold an account. Where the student is a minor, a parent or guardian must set up the account and give consent — the service asks for this explicitly before any academic information is collected.

Give us accurate information. A review built on a GPA or class rank that was mistyped will be confidently wrong, and we have no way to detect that from our side.

The free sample is one run. The full review is $49.99 and includes 3 full runs and 20 follow-up questions for one application cycle. Those limits are what the product enforces, and this sentence is generated from the same values the software uses, so it cannot drift out of step with them.

Re-running does not delete an earlier review — every review stays readable under “My reviews” for the cycle.

If you cannot afford this, use the fee waiver. It is the same review, in full, at no cost. We would rather give it away than have a family priced out of an honest answer.

If the review does not work — it fails to generate, or it is plainly wrong about facts you gave us — write in and we will refund you. We will not argue about it.

What we cannot refund is a disappointing answer. A review that tells you a school is a long shot has done its job, and that is the job you paid for. Telling families what they want to hear is the one thing this product exists not to do.

Covered in full on the privacy page. In short: uploaded files are read and discarded, never stored. The numbers you confirm are kept against your account and deleted after one application cycle. Nothing you give us is used to train any AI model.

The review is for your family’s own use. Please do not resell it, republish it as your own, or use it to build a competing dataset. Do not attempt to scrape the service, share access codes outside the people they were given to, or create multiple accounts to work around the free-sample limit.

We may suspend an account that does these things. If we get that wrong, write in and we will fix it.

To the fullest extent the law allows, our total liability to you for any claim arising out of this service is limited to the amount you actually paid us in the twelve months before the claim.

We are not liable for indirect or consequential losses — including admission or rejection outcomes, lost scholarships or aid, application fees, or opportunities forgone by acting on a binding commitment. The service is provided as-is, without warranty that it will be uninterrupted or error-free.

Some jurisdictions do not allow these limits, in which case they apply only as far as they legally can. Nothing here limits liability for fraud or for anything that cannot lawfully be excluded.

We may update these terms. If a change materially affects what you have already paid for, we will tell you rather than quietly amend the page.

These terms are governed by the laws of the State of North Carolina, United States.

Questions about any of this, a refund, or a request to delete your data: write to us at the address on the privacy page. A real person reads it.