The single-profile-many-awards model collapsed because free products in this category run on ad and lender subsidy, and that subsidy stopped working. The discovery problem is real. But discovery was never the part of the job that decided whether your kid could afford the school they got into.
One-time payment. 30-day money back. Built around your student and your target schools.
Going Merry was acquired by Earnest in 2021 and operated as a free consumer product subsidized by lender and institutional partnerships. When that subsidy structure stopped covering the cost of running the platform, the consumer side wound down. Five million scholarship listings did not get smaller. The bottleneck moved.
For families, the problem is not that scholarships disappeared. It is that a single tool that organized discovery, profile matching, and one-click application is gone, and the products still standing — Bold.org, Fastweb, ScholarshipOwl, the high school portal — are running on the same ad-subsidized model Going Merry just exited. Which means another reset is plausible on the same timeline.
Bold.org, Fastweb, Scholarships.com, ScholarshipOwl. The same model that just collapsed under Going Merry. You'll spend the same 40 hours rebuilding profiles, get the same generic matches, and get the same silence on whether each award will reduce your kid's institutional aid at the schools they actually applied to.
Fast. Free. Confidently wrong. It will hallucinate deadlines, cite awards that ended two cycles ago, and have no idea that the merit grant at one of your kid's top schools displaces outside scholarships dollar-for-dollar past $2,500. We built this product because we tried that route first.
MeritPlaybook is the done-for-you replacement. One intake form, $179, under 30 minutes. You get ranked scholarships specific to your student and target schools, school-by-school stacking flags, deadlines in order, and every trap award marked before it can quietly reduce the aid your kid already has. Cross-checked across five independent research systems before it ships.
Get your student's plan · $179 →A $5,000 outside scholarship is a great win at one of your kid’s schools and a $5,000 reduction in institutional aid at another. No free aggregator — Going Merry included — ever told you which one was which. That is the analysis a MeritPlaybook is built around: every award, ranked against your specific target list, with the trap awards flagged before you spend the weekend writing the essay.
| Job to be done | Going Merry (gone) | MeritPlaybook |
|---|---|---|
| Pricing model | Free, ad/lender-subsidized | $179, one-time |
| Scholarship discovery | ~5M listings, profile matching | Ranked candidates from 5 research systems, deduped and reconciled |
| School-by-school stacking analysis | Not included | Yes, every school on your list |
| Displacement / trap-award flags | Not included | Yes, flagged before you apply |
| Deadline calendar in priority order | Per-award basis | One ordered list, ranked by likelihood and value |
| Source verification | None disclosed | Every URL fetched and verified before delivery |
| Application submission | Single-app routing through partners | Not included — you apply through providers |
| Turnaround | Instant matching | Under 30 minutes from intake to delivery |
Every recommendation is generated independently across five systems. Anything that does not corroborate is discarded before delivery. We don’t pass single-source guesses.
Citations are fetched and validated at delivery time. Deadlines pulled from cached pages don’t reach you. This is the failure mode that breaks ChatGPT-only attempts.
One-time payment, no subscription, no upsell into coaching. If the playbook doesn’t hold up against your kid’s actual aid letters, we refund. Built by Paul Takisaki.
Yes. Going Merry, the free scholarship platform that let students apply to multiple awards through a single profile, has shut down. It was acquired by Earnest in 2021 and operated as a free product subsidized by lender and institutional partnerships. When that subsidy structure stopped working, the consumer side wound down.
If you had a Going Merry profile with applications in flight, those applications no longer route to scholarship providers through the platform. You will need to reapply through each provider directly, or work from a different list.
No. MeritPlaybook is $179, one-time. We are not a free aggregator and we do not run on ad subsidy or lender partnerships, which is the model that just collapsed.
What you pay for is research. Five independent systems generate scholarship candidates from your student's intake form. Every claim is cross-checked across those systems and reconciled against the verified institutional database before anything reaches you. Anything that cannot be corroborated is discarded, not passed along.
There is no direct profile import. Going Merry's profile data was structured around their single-application matching model. MeritPlaybook is a strategy product, not an application portal, so it asks different questions: full target school list, intended major, financial aid context, and the merit-aid signals that affect stacking decisions.
The intake form takes about five minutes. If you already have your student's GPA, test scores, and target school list handy, it is faster.
They are still operating, and they solve the same problem Going Merry solved: discovery. If your goal is to find scholarships your student qualifies for and submit applications, they remain a reasonable starting point and they cost nothing.
What none of them do is tell you which of those scholarships will actually help at the specific colleges on your kid's list. Knowing that the merit grant at one school stacks while the merit grant at another displaces dollar-for-dollar is the analysis MeritPlaybook delivers, and it is the part free aggregators have never solved at scale.
That page was written when Going Merry was operational and frames the two products as complementary — discovery on one side, strategy on the other. With Going Merry shut down, that framing is no longer useful for families who used it as their primary tool.
This page is written for the families whose tool just disappeared. It explains what to do next and why a strategy product is not the same thing as another free aggregator.
MeritPlaybook does not host scholarship applications and does not write or edit essays. It tells you which awards to pursue, in what order, with deadlines and stacking flags. You apply through each scholarship provider directly.
If application volume is the bottleneck and budget is the primary constraint, free aggregators are still the right tool for that piece of the job. Many families will use both.
Every week you wait is one less week your student has to apply. The job takes our researchers a few hours. It takes you five minutes to order.
Get your student’s plan · $17930-day money-back guarantee. One-time payment. No subscriptions.