CANDOR

I'm a HS senior building Candor — a free college admissions chances calculator. Soft-launched on Reddit a few days ago and currently at 34 users / 24 active profiles. Wanted to share the why and how here.

Every chances calculator I tried while working on my own list was wildly inaccurate. One showed Cornell's SAT mid-50% as 1120–1285 (real number is 1510–1560 — turned out it was matching Cornell College in Iowa). Federal Scorecard data lags 1–2 cycles. A bunch of newer tools just have AI generate the stats, which means you can ask the same question on five different sites and get five different SAT ranges, none of which match the school’s actual reported numbers. So I started by hand-pulling the actual Common Data Set PDFs from each school's institutional research page. I’ve verified 80+ schools so far and I’m working through more.

The model is a multi-component fit score (GPA, test scores, course rigor, ECs, leadership, awards) combined with hook signals (legacy at the specific school, athlete, first-gen, demonstrated interest), along with weights for what each school actually values. The odds curve is calibrated to be honest — I cap elite schools at sub-15% even for strong applicants, because that’s reality. Most existing tools tell everyone they have a 30% shot at Stanford, which just isn’t true.

The stack is a single Flask file, SQLite + WAL, and Anthropic Claude Haiku for the AI advisor and content generation, deployed on Railway. It’s simple but fast to iterate.

Right now I’m at 34 users, 24 with completed profiles (71% activation), 54 chances run (~2.25 schools per active user), and 0 paid users (free tier covers chances and browsing; paid is $5/month for AI advisor and unlimited plans). A practicing college consultant DM’d offering verified CDS data, which is the relationship I’m most excited about so far.

Going forward, I need to verify more schools’ CDS data (currently 80, aiming for 150+), crack r/ApplyingToCollege (their automod queues new accounts, so I’m posting in friendlier subs first), pivot some content to TikTok where the audience is bigger and moderation is looser, and test parent-targeted angles since most high schoolers don’t have $5/month to spend.

Open to any feedback — especially if you’ve launched into a niche that’s semi-hostile or hard to post in, since that’s my current bottleneck.