Privacy
Your profile exists to explain eligibility to you. It is never shown publicly and is never sold or shared with sponsors.
Questions about gender identity, race and ethnicity, first-generation status, disability, military service and your family's finances are always optional, and every one can be answered "prefer not to answer".
If you choose to save them, they are stored in a separate, locked part of our database. Only you can read them, through your own signed-in account. Our staff screens can't see them, and they are never shown with your matches, sold, shared with sponsors, used for advertising, or included in analytics or error reports.
An answer is shown on an application's answer sheet only if you release it to that application. You can withdraw a release, change an answer or clear it at any time. Deleting your account deletes all of them.
Matching uses one of these answers only if you turn on "use this to find scholarships for me" for that answer, and that check happens on your device.
If your date of birth shows you are under 18, these sections are not available.
Product analytics record which screens and actions are used, identified only by an opaque account identifier — never your name, email, institution, grades, or citizenship.
Error reports are scrubbed of personal notes, contact details, and profile values before they are sent.
Analytics and ads only run as your privacy choices allow — see cookies and similar storage below.
Advertising
ArchMyWay is free. To pay for it, we show ads from Google AdSense on public pages: opportunity listings and opportunity details. There are no ads on your profile, your questionnaire, your vault, your applications, sign-in or settings.
We ask Google for non-personalized ads only. They are chosen from the page you are reading and your general location, not from a profile of you. We never send Google your questionnaire answers, your finances, your demographic answers, your saved scholarships or anything else from your account.
Google uses cookies to show ads, limit how often you see the same one and measure them, even when ads are non-personalized. We show no ads at all to visitors in the European Economic Area, the United Kingdom and Switzerland. Elsewhere you can turn ads off under Your Privacy Choices, and a Global Privacy Control signal from your browser turns them off automatically. You can learn how Google uses this information at policies.google.com/technologies/partner-sites, and opt out of personalized advertising across the web at adssettings.google.com.
ArchMyWay Ad-Free removes every ad, for $1.99 a month or $14.99 a year. Nothing else changes: every feature of ArchMyWay is free with or without it.
Cookies and similar storage
We sort what we store on your device into categories. Essential storage is always on. Visitors in the European Economic Area, the United Kingdom and Switzerland, and anyone whose location we can't tell, are asked first: nothing optional runs until they choose. Everyone else gets analytics and ads by default and can turn them off at any time. If your browser sends a Global Privacy Control signal, we treat it as opting out of analytics and advertising.
lets you change your choice at any time; it is also in the footer of every page. Your choice lasts 180 days, after which we ask again.
Essential
| Name | Where | Purpose |
|---|---|---|
| sb-…-auth-token | Local storage (Supabase) | Keeps you signed in. Only set when you have an account. |
| amw.consent, amw_consent | Local storage and a first-party cookie | Remembers your privacy choices for 180 days. |
| amw.v1.* | Local storage | Your reading and appearance settings, recently viewed opportunities, saved filters and comparisons on this device. |
| amw.pending-action, amw.onboarding.pending | Session storage (this tab only) | Finishes what you started (a save, or onboarding answers) after you sign in. |
Analytics (optional)
PostHog (product analytics), Sentry (masked session replay) and Vercel Speed Insights (page speed). Sentry error reports are always on: they are scrubbed of personal details and set no cookie.
| Name | Where | Purpose |
|---|---|---|
| ph_…_posthog | Cookie and local storage (PostHog) | A random identifier so PostHog can count visits and screens. Text and inputs are masked. |
| sentryReplaySession | Session storage (Sentry) | Masked session replay, used to see what went wrong when a page breaks. |
| None | Vercel Speed Insights | Measures how fast pages load. Sets no cookie. |
Advertising (optional)
Google AdSense, on public listing pages only, and never in the European Economic Area, the United Kingdom or Switzerland. Google sets its own cookies to show and measure ads; they are described at policies.google.com/technologies/cookies.
If you join your school's cohort
Joining is your choice, with an invite code from your school. You choose “Totals only” or “Share my progress”, can change it at any time in settings, and can leave whenever you like. Advisors see nothing for a group smaller than 10.
What an advisor can see
- Totals for their own school's cohort only, and only once at least 10 students have joined: upcoming deadlines among saved opportunities, applications by stage, funding applied for, the total funding-plan gap students chose to count, and the kinds of opportunities saved.
- How many of the cohort's seats are in use.
- For students who chose “Share my progress”: their name, how many opportunities they saved, applications in progress and submitted, their next deadline, and the funding gap they chose to share.
What an advisor can never see
- Any totals or progress for a cohort of fewer than 10 students — only how many seats are in use.
- The name or progress of a student who chose “Totals only”.
- Your profile answers, grades, citizenship, financial need, first-generation or veteran status.
- Your notes, saved-list notes, reminders, or the details of your funding plan.
- Anything after you leave the cohort or delete your account — you disappear from every advisor view immediately.