About
Strategy, not a search engine.
We don’t sell scholarship lists. We sell the answer.
MeritPlaybook produces one personalized scholarship strategy document per student. You buy the playbook for $249, fill out the intake form, and within 72 hours you receive a strategy document with the scholarships worth pursuing for your student’s actual profile and target schools, the awards that will displace institutional aid (and which schools to avoid them at), the order to apply in, and realistic aid range estimates per school. Every claim is verified against the source by a human analyst before the playbook ships. We focus entirely on merit aid and scholarship strategy. We don’t do admissions counseling, we don’t guarantee outcomes, and we don’t pretend to know more about your school’s aid policy than its financial aid office. We do the research families don’t have time to do.
What MeritPlaybook is
A done-for-you scholarship strategy document delivered as a single PDF within 48 to 72 hours of completing the intake form. The document covers ranked scholarship recommendations specific to the student, school-by-school stacking analysis for every school on the target list, pursue / conditional / drop decisions for each award, a deadline calendar, and realistic aid range estimates (floor / mid / ceiling) per school.
One price, one delivery, no upsell. $249. We don’t upsell into coaching, we don’t sell course subscriptions, and we don’t hold pieces of the playbook hostage behind premium tiers.
Why it exists
The category is dominated by free databases that list 1.5 million scholarships and call it a service. The free version of every scholarship database returns 200 awards your student is technically eligible for, none of which are ranked, none of which are checked against your target schools’ institutional aid policies, and none of which tell you which ones to skip. That’s not a strategy. That’s a homework assignment with no answer key.
MeritPlaybook started when Paul Takisaki applied multi-model AI research to scholarship discovery for his own family’s college search, realized the gap, and turned the document he built for his own student into a product. The methodology came first. The product came second.
How it’s different
Three things that no scholarship database produces:
- School-by-school stacking analysis. Every target school on your list gets a stacking section showing exactly which outside scholarships will reduce institutional aid at that school and which ones add dollar-for-dollar.
- Pursue / conditional / drop recommendations. Every scholarship recommendation comes with a verdict. Not just “here’s a list, good luck.”
- Realistic aid range estimates per school. Floor, mid, and ceiling for institutional aid at each school based on published merit thresholds and stacking rules. So you know, before April, what each acceptance letter is likely to look like.
None of this is something a database can produce because none of it is a list. It’s analysis. It requires research time and human judgment, and that’s what the $249 buys.
Who runs it
MeritPlaybook is run by Paul Takisaki, the founder and creator of Ask Three AI, supported by a human analyst team that verifies every playbook before it ships. Paul’s background is 20 years at Verizon, Bellevue University, and the Harvard Program on Negotiations. He is an AI research specialist, not a financial aid officer, and MeritPlaybook’s positioning reflects that: we apply disciplined research methodology to a category that needs it, and we don’t claim credentials we don’t have.
What we don’t do
We don’t do admissions counseling. We don’t write or edit college essays. We don’t guarantee scholarship awards. We don’t sell anonymous AI reports. We don’t work with international students. We don’t publish “average savings” statistics because averages lie. If you need any of those things, MeritPlaybook is the wrong product. If you need a focused merit aid strategy delivered in 72 hours, that is literally all we do.
Want to see what a real playbook looks like before you buy? View a sample playbook, or start your student’s playbook.