Strategy, not a search engine.

What MeritPlaybook is

A done-for-you scholarship strategy document delivered as an interactive web dossier under 5 minutes after you complete the intake form. The document covers ranked scholarship recommendations specific to the student, school-by-school analysis of how awards combine for every school on the target list, a Pursue / Stack / Skip call on each award, a deadline calendar, and realistic aid range estimates (low to high) per school.

One price, one delivery, no upsell. $99. 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 analysis of how awards combine. Every target school on your list gets a section on how awards combine showing exactly which outside scholarships will reduce institutional aid at that school and which ones add dollar-for-dollar.
• Pursue / Stack / Skip 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 combining 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 grounded in official school policies, scholarship rules, and source-backed reasoning, and that’s what the $99buys.

Who runs it

MeritPlaybook is run by Paul Takisaki, the founder and creator of Ask Three AI. The platform is fully automated end-to-end: every playbook is generated by multiple research passes that check each finding against current school policies, scholarship requirements, and published aid rules before it reaches the dossier. Paul’s background is 20 years at Verizon, Bellevue University, and the Harvard Program on Negotiations. He is an AI research specialist whose work is focused on reducing hallucinations and grounding answers in source-backed reasoning, and MeritPlaybook’s methodology reflects that: we apply disciplined research 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 under 5 minutes, that is literally all we do.