Plain answers for
a big decision.

Bloom is always available, remembers the full journey, researches public college facts, and keeps plans moving between meetings. A good human counselor brings lived judgment, nuance, and a relationship no software can replace. Bloom is designed to make human counseling more effective — and to give families a thoughtful guide when a counselor is not in the room.

Yes, and the architecture matters: each family has its own isolated database. Your household is not one tenant-id column inside a giant shared family-data table. Access is limited to the people your family authorizes and the processors required to run Bloom. We do not sell student data or use it to train AI models.

No. The Journal and Rewind are private to the student's own login — a parent sees counts, such as three journal entries this month, never the words. Chat conversations belong to whoever opened them, so a parent cannot read the student's and the student cannot read the parent's. Essay drafts can be shared deliberately, and a student who has claimed their own login can switch on privacy mode to keep every draft to themselves.

Only the student can flip that switch, because a switch a parent can flip is not privacy. What parents see is how the journey is going — progress, deadlines, what is coming next — not a transcript. Working on this together does not require opening every draft.

Only the context Bloom supplies for the feature you ask to use. That might include relevant profile facts, the essay section being coached, or the current conversation. The model does not receive account credentials or automatically roam through the family's whole database. AI requests are sent through an AI request gateway under zero-data-retention routing, and important output should still be checked against official sources.

Yes. Financial-aid estimates in Bloom take citizenship and residency status into account, so the numbers reflect the aid your student can actually reach — including when federal aid is not an option and state or institutional aid is the real path. That information lives in your family's own isolated database like everything else, and Bloom asks for a status category, never for documents. Aid rules change and vary by state, so confirm the details against official sources before making decisions.

You can try that engine before signing up for anything: financial aid for H-1B and visa families and is my child FAFSA-eligible? both run the real one, and in-state vs out-of-state shows what a public college's two tuitions mean for your family.

Yes. A family can have separate adult logins and a separate student login, all working from the same plan. Notifications are controlled by each account, so one parent can receive email reminders without forcing them on everyone.

No. Bloom is built for families on their own — a student login, a parent login, and one shared plan. If you already work with a counselor, you can invite them, and they only ever see what you consent to share.

Yes. Your family can grant a counselor access through a permissioned share link, use live counselor sessions, and keep notes and next steps tied to the journey. The family controls the connection; becoming a counselor does not grant access to every Bloom household.

Foundation is $49/month for grades 9–11: journey planning, profile and portfolio building, clubs discovery, study plans, Learning Lab, and Ask Bloom. Application is $99/month and includes everything in Foundation plus essay coaching, application tracking, scholarship matching with ROI analysis, live counselor sessions, and unlimited AI counselor with voice.

“Unlimited” means there is no per-message charge or message pack to buy. The fair-use ceiling is currently 400 AI requests per family per day (voice replies draw on the same allowance) — a busy application week rarely passes 100 — and temporary service-availability limits can also apply.

Ninth grade is when the quiet compounding starts. In the national study that follows US students from ninth grade on, reviewing the education plan yearly with an adult was associated with higher FAFSA completion and college enrollment — and Foundation ($49/month for grades 9–11) is built for exactly those years: interests becoming direction, activities and awards accumulating, course planning against graduation requirements, test prep, and the quarterly family check-in that makes the yearly conversation actually happen.

The senior-year machinery — essays, applications, scholarships — arrives with Application when it's needed. Starting early means grade 12 opens with a four-year record instead of a scramble to reconstruct one.

Yes. Plans are monthly and you can cancel anytime. Cancellation stops future renewal; it does not erase the family immediately. You may request an export before closing the account, and you can separately request deletion.

From Plan & Billing inside Bloom. Payments run through Stripe, and a parent can open the secure Stripe portal from that page to update the card. If a payment fails, nothing is locked right away — the plan stays fully active through a grace window (currently 21 days) while you fix it, and the page shows the exact date.

Yes. Families can request an export of their records in portable formats. A student-only export keeps household financial fields private. You can also request whole-family deletion.

Neither ever requires an active subscription: export and deletion keep working on the day you cancel and any day after, by design — a paywall in front of your own data is not a business model Bloom is willing to have.

Sign up with Google, tell us the student's grade, and add a card. The first 14 days are free, and the plan that matches the grade starts billing after that — $49/month for grades 9–11, $99/month for the application year. Cancel any time during the trial and you are not charged.

Every plan starts with the family basics: a login for each student and each parent, a four-year journey timeline, and privacy built for teenagers — parents see progress, plans, and deadlines, never private journal entries or essay drafts. A counselor you already work with can be invited and only ever sees what you consent to share, and a student whose stated grade is below 9th rides along free.

Grades 9–11 — Foundation: turning interests into direction, clubs and competitions from their own school and nearby, course planning against graduation requirements (Bloom can read a transcript, including a PDF), GPA and stats that stay current, an activities-and-awards record that grows each year, SAT/ACT prep, Learning Lab study sessions, a weekly view that knows the school's calendar, quarterly Family Check-Ins, and Ask Bloom for questions along the way.

Grade 12 — Application includes everything in Foundation plus the senior-year machinery: building the college list, application and deadline tracking in one command center, essay coaching that improves your student's own drafts rather than writing for them, interview practice, scholarship matching with the return-on-investment math, a financial picture for every college — your family's estimated price, not the sticker — live counselor sessions, and unlimited AI counselor with voice.

The Features page walks through all of it in detail, and your family's data can leave with you whenever you choose.