Premium
$4.99/month. Cosmetics and convenience. Nothing that affects where you get in.
What it includes
| Perk | Detail |
|---|---|
| Gold badge & purple aura | Your avatar gets a gold ring, a star badge and a purple glow everywhere it appears. |
| Full avatar studio | Every species and colour unlocked immediately. |
| Unlimited PDF exports | Including essay drafts. |
| Unlimited contributors | Invite as many mentors and family as you want. |
| 150 credits monthly | Three or four marketplace essays a month. |
| Directory priority | Surfaces first in admitted-group directories you have opted into. |
What it is not
Premium does not unlock opportunities, deadlines, essay tools, aid tracking, testing, the honors finder, exports or anything else that affects an application outcome. Those are free and will stay free. Charging students for the part that matters would defeat the point of building this.
No payment processor is connected in this build, so the premium toggle flips instantly without charging. See Terms.
Avatar studio
Six species, Bloop, Mochi, Ember, Professor, Biscuit and Pip, in six colours, plus four accessory slots that are free to everyone:
| Slot | Options |
|---|---|
| Eyewear | None, round glasses, shades, star shades, monocle |
| Cheeks | Blush, freckles, clear |
| Companion | None, star, bee, sprout, book |
| Backdrop | None, dots, rays, ring |
Headgear is the exception, and stays earned: headband at level 3, party hat at 5, graduation cap at 8, crown at 10. The picker only offers what you have unlocked, and Avatar re-checks the choice against your level when it renders, so editing the saved value cannot put a crown on a level 1 account. Set the slot to “highest earned” to always wear your best. Premium layers the gold ring and aura on top of whatever you have earned.
Avatars are drawn as inline SVG, so they render instantly and scale to any size without assets.
Listing photo
Free for everyone, and deliberately not a premium feature. Any student can put a real photograph on their Open to Work listing instead of an avatar. JPEG, PNG, WebP or GIF, 8MB maximum.
Two formats are refused, for different reasons. SVG can carry script and would be served from our own origin. HEIC, which iPhones shoot by default, cannot be displayed by Chrome or Firefox, so storing one would leave most recruiters looking at a broken image; the upload explains how to get a JPEG instead rather than failing silently.
This was briefly behind premium, which was a mistake. A face on a profile plainly affects whether somebody gets hired, and nothing that affects that outcome belongs behind a paywall. Premium adds the gold ring around the photo, which affects nothing.
Every condition that allowed the upload is re-checked when the photo is served, rather than trusted from the stored row, because all of them can change afterwards:
- Unpublishing takes it down. The photo 404s the moment the listing is unpublished, so it is not left reachable to anyone holding the URL.
- Lapsing premium does not take it down. The photo is free, so it survives a cancelled subscription; only the gold ring goes.
- A session is required. These are usually photographs of minors, so they are not fetchable by anyone who guesses a user id, and they are served
Cache-Control: privateso no shared cache keeps a copy after a listing comes down.