It started with a visit.
Petr, a high school student staring down his own college list, walked into his counselor's office with his dad Mikhail. They expected answers. Instead, they found software that felt like it was built a decade ago, spreadsheets held together with hope, and a process that gave every student the same generic list regardless of who they actually were.
The tools weren't bad because the counselors were bad — the counselors were working overtime with what they had. The tools were bad because nobody had bothered to rebuild them for how admissions actually works in 2026.
So they looked at the alternative.
If the school tools were outdated, maybe private college counseling had figured it out. Petr and his dad started pricing it. What they found shocked them.
The two-tier system was right there in plain numbers. Students at well-resourced schools walk into selective colleges with a quiet advantage that has nothing to do with being smarter or working harder — it's just who had access to the right information at the right time.
The math existed. Nobody had shipped it.
Admissions is, underneath the stress and the mystique, a sorting problem. Real Common Data Set statistics, real yield rates, real early-decision multipliers. Nothing private advisors know that isn't published somewhere — they're just the only ones building software around it.
So the two of them started building. Petr brought the student's-eye view of what this tool actually had to feel like; Mikhail brought the engineering chops of someone who'd spent a career shipping software. Together: 192 colleges. 12,000+ high schools. An agent-based Monte Carlo simulation that runs a student's admissions cycle 100 times and shows the distribution of outcomes — not a single fake "68% chance," but the actual spread of what could happen.
The goal wasn't to replace counselors. It was to give every student — regardless of their zip code or their family's bank account — the kind of personalized modeling that used to cost five figures.
$200. The cost of one hour with an advisor.
College Monte Carlo is $200. That's not an arbitrary number — it's roughly what a single hour with a private college advisor costs. For the same price as one meeting, you get the full simulation: 192 colleges, 100 Monte Carlo runs, your personal distribution of outcomes, and every piece of research we've built behind it.
We picked that number on purpose. It's low enough that it's not gatekept behind a five-figure package, but real enough that we can keep building, keep calibrating, and keep the data honest instead of chasing ad revenue.
Transparent, and built in the open.
The simulation is documented. The data sources are cited. We publish our calibration results, including the ones where we got it wrong and had to fix it.
We're still a father and son who walked into a counselor's office and thought the rest of the country deserved better tools. That's still the plan.