Every student gets four years. Bloom makes them count.

On your own computer. Bloom runs as an app on your machine and stores your family's records there, with nightly local backups. There's no Bloom cloud holding your data — nothing to breach on a server we run.

The app keeps working — your records, trackers, and plans are all local. The parts that reach out — AI drafting and encrypted sharing — simply pause and pick back up on their own once the connection returns. Nothing is lost.

Only what the student chooses to share. A share link carries an encrypted snapshot that decrypts in the counselor's browser; the server can't read it. You can add a PIN, and a single click revokes the link whenever you want.

No. Bloom prepares everything to the exact limits — activity descriptions at 50, 100, and 150 characters, essays coached and ready — and you paste it into the Common App yourself. Bloom is an independent product and isn't affiliated with the Common Application.

Yes — and it's honest about where the suggestions come from. Bloom reads your student's own school website and lists the real clubs it finds there, each linked to the page it came from, matched to your student's interests. It never invents a club or guesses what your school offers. Where a school doesn't publish a clubs list, Bloom suggests the kinds of clubs worth asking about for each interest — and if there's an interest with no club to join, it nudges your student toward starting one, which is a strong signal on an application. It also suggests internships, summer programs, and competitions near you that fit their interests.

Ninth grade is the year the research keeps pointing at: in University of Chicago Consortium studies, freshman-year GPA and staying on track predicted high-school graduation and college enrollment better than test scores did. Bloom's freshman year is built around that — a 20-minute Family Check-In each quarter with an agenda built from your student's real data, the two-minute On Track read from a report card, the private journal and the What I'm into interests timeline, and one low-pressure guidance note a month. No essays, no countdowns — the application tools stay folded away until they're relevant.

Parents see progress and counts — check-ins on the calendar, deadlines met, sections done — never the private words. The journal, the What I'm into timeline, and the semester Rewind are the student's; a Rewind is seen only when the student chooses to show it, often at a Family Check-In. And where Bloom brings a parent in, it coaches them to ask rather than assign — the check-in agenda scripts questions, and the goals that come out of it are written by the student.

No — the opposite, in writing. Bloom has no streaks, no guilt mechanics, and no dark patterns; it's built to be put down. For ninth and tenth graders there are no application countdowns at all — senior tools stay folded away, and guidance arrives as one low-pressure note a month. When something does need attention, Bloom frames it the way it frames an On Track miss: worth a conversation, not a crisis.

AI requests are proxied through your family's Bloom host. Drafts are grounded in the student's own records — real activities, the real essay in progress — and personal details are scrubbed before anything leaves. The AI helps write; it doesn't invent facts about your student.

No — by design, not just by policy. The essay coach can't produce an essay on request: it starts by asking questions and drawing out the student's own stories, and it only proposes a starting draft after the student has shared real, specific moments. Every AI draft is labeled — essays, supplement answers, and brag sheets carry an "AI draft — make it yours" badge until the student has substantially rewritten the draft in their own words. Nothing AI-written is silently saved as the student's work.

A general chatbot will write a whole essay from a one-line prompt, invent details to fill the gaps, and remember nothing about your student. Bloom won't. Its drafts use only material the student actually provided — where that material is thin, it inserts a bracketed placeholder asking for the student's real detail instead of making one up — and they're matched to the student's own writing rhythm and vocabulary, not a generic teenager voice. Feedback quotes the student's own sentences, and prose that sounds AI-written is flagged as a weakness for the student to rework personally — Bloom refuses to auto-rewrite it.

Colleges set their own rules, and they change. Bloom keeps a curated policy file — the Common App's fraud policy plus individual colleges' AI policies, each dated and linked to its official source, re-verified before each application season — and shows the relevant ones right in the essay workspace for the schools on the student's list. Bloom's own standard travels with every AI request: a draft is a starting point, and the words a student submits must be their own. The Common App's limits are enforced by the app itself — an essay can't be marked final while it's over the word limit. As with everything in a planning guide, confirm a college's current policy on its official site before submitting.

Bloom labels AI-generated content, cites where data comes from, and shows when it was last updated. Even so, colleges change deadlines, requirements, and costs without notice — treat Bloom as your family's planning guide and confirm important details on official websites before acting on them.

Most documents — transcripts, score reports — are read entirely on your own computer and never leave it. A scanned or photographed document that needs heavier processing is sent to the Bloom service end-to-end encrypted, converted in memory, and returned encrypted; nothing is stored, and even the relay in between sees only ciphertext. Your files live with you.

Yes. Bloom gives eligibility-aware guidance for citizens, permanent residents, EAD holders, DACA recipients, and asylee or TPS families — the aid, the deadlines, and the options that actually apply to your situation. Most tools ignore this entirely.

Automatically, overnight. As long as your computer and Docker are running, Bloom quietly pulls the latest version in the background. There's nothing for you to install or click.

A computer that can run Docker (Mac, Windows, or Linux) and about ten minutes. One line in the terminal does the rest, and the setup guide walks you through every step.