For students comparing college offers
Your aid letter calls loans “aid.”
Paste a financial aid offer. Gift or Debt marks up every line the way a counselor would, splits the money you keep from the money you repay, and shows what four years really cost.
Runs in your browserNo accountNothing you paste leaves the page
§01 · Try it
Drop in a letter, or open ours.
Add an offer
Paste the letter or the aid portal page. Fall/spring columns, per-semester amounts and footnotes are handled. A PDF works too.
Use Claude (optional, your own key)
Claude can read photos, scanned PDFs and odd layouts, and reword the email. It never does the math: every amount it reads is checked against the letter's text before the page uses it. Your key stays in this tab and is sent only to api.anthropic.com.
Or open a sample letter
The three schools are fictional. The tricks are not.
§02 · How it works
Name every dollar. Then do the math in the open.
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01
Read the letter
Rules find every dollar amount and what it is: cost, grant, loan or work-study. Totals are set aside and checked against the lines. Fall/spring columns and “per semester” amounts become a year. Every line keeps the words it came from, and you can fix any of them.
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02
Split the money
Net price is the cost of attendance minus gift aid. Loans and work-study don't lower it; they're ways to pay it. Over four years costs grow, first-year-only awards drop off, borrowing repeats and interest builds on unsubsidized, private and Parent PLUS loans while you're in school.
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03
Flag it, then ask
Loans counted as aid. A Parent PLUS loan closing the gap. Books and travel left out. A scholarship that's first-year only. Totals that don't match their lines. Then it drafts polite, specific questions for the aid office.
§03 · Where Claude fits
Claude can read the letter. It never does the math.
Without a key, everything runs on rules and plain arithmetic. With your own Anthropic key, held only in this tab, Claude reads what the rules can't: a photo of a paper letter, a scanned PDF, an odd layout. It can also reword the email.
- Every amount is checked. Before the page uses a line Claude read, its dollar figure has to appear in the letter's text. A number the model invents or misreads is dropped.
- Photos are marked. Lines read from a photo can't be checked that way, so each one is flagged for you to confirm.
- The email keeps its numbers. Every dollar figure in Claude's rewording has to appear in the draft, or the draft is kept.
- The math is code. Every number on the page comes from
js/money.js, covered by tests.
Loan terms are for loans first disbursed July 1, 2026 to June 30, 2027 (Federal Student Aid, GENERAL-26-33): 6.52% for undergraduate Direct Loans with a 1.057% fee, 9.07% for Parent PLUS with a 4.228% fee. Monthly payments assume the standard 10-year plan. Every assumption can be changed on the page. These are estimates to check with the school, not financial advice.