What's New
New updates and improvements to College Aid Index
College Aid Index Free to Use
Update
Until further notice, we are announcing that College Aid Index is free to use. If you are a paying customer, we will reach out to you over the coming days to cancel your subscription and offer you the free version.
We hope by making this free we are able to help more families.
Thank you,
The College Aid Index team
We hope by making this free we are able to help more families.
Thank you,
The College Aid Index team
Two new features to help search
New
As we continue to get feedback and iterate on providing value to students and parents, we have two new features.
Every college has a detailed page with additional financial and outcome data to keep you informed. Just click on the college name to see this page. Tell us what you think by filling out the contact page or drop me an email as I read every message and appreciate hearing from you.
Second, targeting colleges based on your family income is helpful. Without filling out FAFSA or revealing your personal financial details, we have a new preset filter called Family Income. Now when searching for a college with that filter, the average net price reported is based on that family income instead of the overall average. This provides a more specific expectation of the net price of the college. The overall net price is still available if you decide not to use this new filter.
We are continuing to iterate on making a useful College Aid Index!
Every college has a detailed page with additional financial and outcome data to keep you informed. Just click on the college name to see this page. Tell us what you think by filling out the contact page or drop me an email as I read every message and appreciate hearing from you.
Second, targeting colleges based on your family income is helpful. Without filling out FAFSA or revealing your personal financial details, we have a new preset filter called Family Income. Now when searching for a college with that filter, the average net price reported is based on that family income instead of the overall average. This provides a more specific expectation of the net price of the college. The overall net price is still available if you decide not to use this new filter.
We are continuing to iterate on making a useful College Aid Index!
Bug fixes: Making sure things are ready for your use
Fix
While we continue to refine the user experience with the main college directory, we have found several issues with the prior release during our testing. Several bugs were squashed. Please reach out to [email protected] if you find any issues while you use the website. Thank you!
Production Incident - site unavailable for approximately 52 hours.
Fix
Incident Summary
On Wed 11/26/2025 I made a classic mistake by rushing a code change before leaving for Thanksgiving break. It broke the site. Monitoring wasn’t in place, so I only learned from users. I’m sorry for the downtime and frustration.
On Wed 11/26/2025 I made a classic mistake by rushing a code change before leaving for Thanksgiving break. It broke the site. Monitoring wasn’t in place, so I only learned from users. I’m sorry for the downtime and frustration.
Impact
- Site unavailable for roughly two days (11/26–11/28).
- Users you contacted directly couldn’t access reports.
Timeline
- Wed 11/26: Last-minute change deployed; no alerts raised.
- Thu 11/27: Outage ongoing; discovered via user reports.
- Fri 11/28: Returned, found the bad change, deployed fix; site restored.
Root Cause
- Rushed, unreviewed code change introduced a breaking error.
- No monitoring to surface the outage quickly.
Resolution
- Fixed the faulty change and redeployed; site is serving traffic now.
Action Items
- No more last-minute deploys without review or a rollback plan.
- Add basic monitoring/alerts so outages are caught immediately.
- Improve test coverage to catch issues before deployment.
Context
This is an early, part-time project, but availability comes first. I’ll prioritize stability over new features when time is limited.
This is an early, part-time project, but availability comes first. I’ll prioritize stability over new features when time is limited.