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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 It gets applications rescinded, and admissions offices are good at spotting it.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.
Listings are priced in dollars, set by the seller (between $1 and $50; most sit around $3–$8). You pay by card, Apple Pay or Google Pay through Stripe Checkout. 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 essay unlocks when Stripe confirms the payment (by webhook, or the moment you land back on the page), and the purchase, the seller's share and the sales count are written together, so a partial failure can never leave you paying for something you cannot read.
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.
Sellers accept a separate agreement first:
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. Upload the essay as the PDF you submitted (or a plain-text file) and Fledgy reads the text out of it for you to check before listing; pasting still works. Sellers keep 70% of each sale.
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 An unpublished seller's name appears on their listing but does not link anywhere.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.
Sellers keep 70% of every sale as a dollar balance, shown in your shop. Withdraw it (from $5) to a bank account or debit card through Stripe Connect: the first time, Stripe walks you through a short setup (identity, bank details, tax information) on its own pages, and Fledgy never sees any of it. After that a withdrawal is one button, and Stripe pays it out within a few business days.
Under 18? Stripe requires the person opening the payout account to be an adult, so a parent or guardian completes the setup in their name and the money is paid to them. Nothing else about selling changes.
An account with earnings still waiting cannot be closed until they are withdrawn. See Terms.