Project Overview
Colleges publish sticker prices almost nobody pays, and award letters are written in ways families struggle to compare. TuitionFit’s founder had the method and the data to fix that, and needed a platform to deliver it at scale.
The goal was not a single website. Partners like counseling services and education platforms needed to offer letter analysis inside their own products, which means the analysis itself had to become a product: an API.
We built the analysis pipeline, the portal that operates it, and a complete reference website that shows partners exactly how to integrate it.
Key Challenges
- Award letters arrive as photos and PDFs in every imaginable format
- The analysis must be right: families make real decisions with it
- Letters the system cannot read still need a human path
- Partners integrate by API, so reliability and clear contracts matter
- One analysis, many front ends: data separate from presentation
The hard part of this product is the messy middle: turning an inconsistent photo of a letter into validated numbers, comparisons, and advice a family can act on.
The Solution
A student uploads an award letter image and a short profile. The system reads the letter with AI-powered OCR, validates what it found, computes the real price after grants and scholarships, compares it against what similar students pay, and returns a five-section report that ends with an appeal strategy.
The API returns both structured data and written analysis, so each partner renders the report their own way. Our reference site shows the full experience end to end.
- Analysis Pipeline
An eight-stage pipeline: OCR, twelve validation rules, school resolution, price metrics, comparison across peer cohorts, and a final written assessment, all running as background jobs.
- AI Where It Earns Its Place
AI reads the letters; deterministic code does the math. Anything the AI cannot read confidently lands in a human review queue instead of guessing.
- Partner API
Submit a letter, poll for the result, or receive a webhook. Keys, usage, and submissions are managed in a self-serve customer portal.
- Operations and Admin
An operator console handles the review queue, customer and key management, audit logs, webhook retries, and data deletion requests.
- Reference Integration
A complete example website, from marketing pages to the upload-and-report flow, that partners use as the blueprint for their own integration.
The Result
An award letter that used to take an expert to interpret becomes a clear report in minutes: the real price, how the offer compares, and what to do about it.
Partners integrate with an API key and build their own experience on top; the reference site proves the path.
The platform grows by adding partners, and every processed letter makes the comparison data stronger.