Essay marketplace
Admitted students sell their essays to students who are where they were last year. Buyers read them watermarked and read-only.
Read this before buying anything. Submitting someone else's words, or a close paraphrase, as your own violates the Common App fraud policy and virtually every college's honor code. It gets applications rescinded, and admissions offices are good at spotting it. These exist to show you what a real one looks like, the same way you would read a sample before writing anything else.
Buying
Listings are priced in credits. Every account starts with 150; most essays sit between 30 and 60. Before your first purchase you must accept an honor-code gate that states plainly what submitting purchased text would be.
Purchases are permanent, you can re-read anything you have unlocked. The credit transaction is wrapped in a database transaction, so a partial failure can never leave you paying for something you cannot read.
How reading is protected
- Text selection, copy, cut, right-click and drag are all blocked.
- Your name is tiled diagonally across the text as a watermark.
- The essay is hidden from print styles.
- Unpurchased essays render blurred behind the paywall, never in the page source.
This is a deterrent, not DRM. Anyone determined can retype or screenshot an essay. The watermark exists to make a leaked copy traceable, and the friction exists to make copy-pasting into an application a deliberate act rather than an accident.
Selling
Sellers accept a separate agreement first:
- Only list essays you personally wrote and submitted.
- Remove anything identifying other people, teachers, friends, family names.
- Don't list an essay if your school or a scholarship holds rights to it.
- Buyers see your name. Sell something you'd be happy to be known for.
A listing holds the college, admit year, major, essay type, the prompt, a public teaser, the essay itself, and, most valuably, a reflection on why you think it worked. Sellers keep 70% of each sale.
Seller profiles
A storefront: headline, where you got in, where you're attending, your story, and one piece of advice you'd give your junior-year self, shown free, because it's the reason people click through.
Profiles are private by default. Nothing is public until you tick publish. An unpublished seller's name appears on their listing but does not link anywhere. Your email, documents and dashboard are never exposed.
Credits
Credits are internal bookkeeping. There is no payment processor connected in this build, so credits cannot be bought and the 70% seller share cannot be withdrawn. Wiring real payments means adding checkout at purchase and payouts at settlement. See Terms.