Pricing
Three plans. One season. No subscription.
Independent essay consultants charge hundreds of dollars per essay. Every plan below covers your application cycle for less than one of those sessions — and ends when the cycle ends. Nothing recurs, nothing renews. Start with one school or cover them all.
An extra reader — never a replacement.
Second Read amplifies the feedback of the counselor and teachers who actually know the student. It substitutes for none of them, least of all the student’s own judgment about what belongs in their story. How we draw that line.
Free — every prompt in the database, plus your first complete review on signup. No card.
Start free →| 2026–27 cycle | Starter $12 one-time 10 essays one school, done properly | Season 40 $25 one-time 40 essays a full list, one good pass | Season Pass $49 through Oct 31 · then $69 the whole season every draft of every essay |
|---|---|---|---|
| Complete reviews — rubric scores, margin notes, fix list | |||
| Authenticity check on every draft | counts toward your total | counts toward your total | counts toward your total |
| Prompt database — every covered school | |||
| School- & prompt-specific grounding | |||
| Get Starter — $12 | Get Season 40 — $25 | Get the pass — $49 |
Payments are handled by Creem, our merchant of record — they take cards and local payment methods where available. Parents welcome to pay: the checkout is a normal receipt-and-done purchase, not an account they have to manage.
Fair prices for where you apply from. Applying from Brazil or Argentina? Checkout shows a lower regional price automatically — same plan, same features, no code to enter.
Questions
Asked often, answered plainly
- Is this allowed under schools' AI policies?
- Second Read only ever gives feedback, scores, and craft flags — it never writes or rewrites any part of your essay, and there is no feature that outputs essay prose. The thing admissions offices ask you not to submit (AI-written text) is the thing this product has no way to produce for you. Policies vary and change, so check each school’s own — where a school publishes one, we link to it on that school’s page. More in our terms.
- Do you write essays?
- No. Ever. Not a sentence, not a phrase, not a “suggested rewrite.” The product has no feature that outputs essay text, by design.
- Does it review the Common App personal statement?
- Yes — Second Read reads any essay you paste, the 650-word personal statement included, against the same six-dimension rubric. For covered schools it also grounds supplement reviews in that school’s prompt and word limit. With some schools dropping supplements this cycle, the personal statement carries more of the weight than ever.
- Does this replace a counselor or a teacher?
- No — it’s an extra reader, and that’s the whole job. The people who know the student read with context we don’t have; Second Read adds a close, prompt-specific read alongside them. When our notes and a counselor’s advice disagree, listen to the human who knows you.
- What happens to my essays?
- We never train AI models on your essays. Delete your data any time. The full policy is short and readable: privacy.
- What if it's not for me?
- Within 14 days of purchase, if you’ve used 3 or fewer paid reviews: full refund, no questions asked. Past that, we handle it case by case — fairly. See refunds.
- What are the review caps?
- Each plan sets a per-season review count — Starter 10, Season 40 forty, Season Pass 150— and authenticity checks count toward it: rubric reviews and authenticity checks draw from one pool, so every plan states one number and nothing is unmetered. The counts stop bulk resale, not you; even Starter’s ten covers a school’s supplements through several drafts.
- Can I upgrade later?
- Yes. Email support@getsecondread.com and we’ll move you up to a bigger plan for the difference — not the full price of the higher one. Whatever reviews you’ve already used carry over.
- Do you have fair prices outside the US?
- Yes. If you’re applying from Brazil or Argentina, checkout shows a lower price for where you apply from — same product, same features, no code to enter. It’s applied automatically.
- Which schools are covered?
- Browse the prompt database — it’s public, no login. The database grows weekly during the season, and every entry shows its source and when it was last verified.