Privacy

The calculator, Compare, the saved summary, and the college pages work without a name, an email address, or an account. You are welcome to use them without ever telling us who you are.

When you use those tools, your browser sends us the numbers you enter, the school you chose, and the resulting estimate. We store that in our database so we can see which parts of the site help families and which do not. We do not attach your name or email to that record because we do not have them.

To make one visit's events add up correctly, your browser keeps a random identifier for itself (a UUID) in its own local storage. This identifier is not your name or email address. Clearing your browser storage or using another browser gives you a new identifier. It stays on your device between visits, so the same device is recognized on a return trip. That means the anonymous records above are pseudonymous, not truly anonymous: they can be linked to each other by that identifier, they just cannot be linked to a person.

Your browser also keeps small session values while you use the site (which page in a wizard you are on, a working comparison, a summary payload being handed to the next page). These stay on your device and are not sent anywhere.

When you click Email Summary or Share Summary on a Summary page, we save one row to our database that contains the school figures on that Summary and the browser identifier described above. That row gets a random 8-character id, and whoever has the link at collegeclearly.com/summary/<id> can open the Summary. Save PDF and Print produce a file on your own device and create no record.

A saved Summary stays in place until you or we remove it. The link is unguessable in practice, but treat it like any private link: only share it with people you want to see the numbers.

On the first page of a visit, we store one row with the browser identifier, the address you arrived on, the address that referred you (if any), and your browser's user-agent string. We use this to understand where families come from and which pages land well. As with the calculation records, no name or email is attached.

The CollegeClearly Report is free, and no payment is collected.

When you request a Report, we store the family and student information you entered into the intake, the colleges you asked us to analyze, the request record, and the generated Report itself. We also store the email address you give us, which we use to send you the Report link and any follow-up about your Report.

Your private Report link contains a random 43-character code. Anyone with the link can open your Report, so save the email we send you and treat the link as private.

We keep the intake, the request record, and the generated Report so you can return to your Report at any time. If you close a CollegeClearly account (see below), the Report and its link continue to work.

You can, but do not have to, create a CollegeClearly account. An account gives you a private workspace to keep the financial side of your college decision in one place: a list of saved schools, your family's current assumptions, CollegeClearly Summaries you have attached to your workspace, and a link to your Report if you requested one.

Attaching a Summary to your workspace links that Summary's database row to your account so it appears in your workspace list. The Summary itself and its collegeclearly.com/summary/<id> link don't change.

Sign-in uses a one-time link emailed to you. There is no password. Links expire in 15 minutes and work once. We store your email address in our identity system and use it only to sign you in. While you are signed in, your browser holds a session token in local storage; signing out clears it.

Other CollegeClearly account holders cannot see what is in your workspace. Access between family accounts is restricted by our application and database controls.

You can close your account from your workspace page. Here is exactly what happens.

• Your list of saved schools is deleted.
• Your family's saved assumptions are deleted.
• Any CollegeClearly Summaries you had attached to your workspace are removed from the workspace. The Summary rows themselves are not deleted; if you had shared a collegeclearly.com/summary/<id> link with anyone, that link continues to work.
• Your email is removed from our identity system, so you can no longer sign in on that account. You can sign in later with the same email if you want; that starts a fresh, empty account with a new workspace.
• If you requested a Report, the Report record and the Report itself are retained. Your user id is removed from the record, so it is no longer linked to a CollegeClearly account, but the private Report link continues to work; you can still open it from any email we sent you with the link.
• Records we kept about your Report intake (the numbers you typed into the intake wizard) are retained but no longer linked to a CollegeClearly account.
• Anonymous records tied to your browser identifier (the calculation and attribution rows described above) are keyed to your browser, not to your account. Closing your account does not remove them. Clearing your browser storage gives that browser a new identifier from that point forward.

Google Analytics 4. The calculator and Compare pages include Google Analytics 4 to count visits and see which pages get used. It sets cookies in your browser and receives your IP address, from which Google derives an approximate city. Google uses this information under its own terms, described in the Google Privacy Policy. Google publishes a browser add-on that turns Google Analytics off across every site that uses it.

Supabase hosts our database, our identity system, and file storage. Every server-side action goes through Supabase.

Netlify hosts the CollegeClearly website and our server functions. Netlify records access logs including your IP address as part of running the site; our own code never stores your raw IP. When a server function needs to prevent abuse it computes a salted SHA-256 hash of the IP address for that purpose only.

Stripe processed payments for an earlier paid version of the Report. No payments are collected now.

Resend sends emails on our behalf: the Report-ready email when you request a Report, and the sign-in link if you use an account.

jsDelivr. The Summary page loads a PDF library from the jsDelivr content network on the first click of Save PDF, and not before.

There is no advertising or remarketing on the site: no Facebook, LinkedIn, DoubleClick, or other advertising pixels.

We do not sell your information. We do not use it to target ads at you. We do not pass it to colleges, lenders, counselors, or anyone else. Nothing you enter into CollegeClearly is used to sell you something on behalf of a third party.

To remove a saved Summary, or to remove any other record we hold about your use of the site, write to info@collegeclearly.com with enough detail (a saved Summary URL, a Report link, or the browser identifier from your device's local storage under key cc_visitor_id) that we can find it. If you have an account, you can also close it from your workspace page; the section above describes what that does.

We update this page when what we do changes. The date at the top shows the last time we changed it.