Free Tools for College Students (and the Parents Paying for It)
College cost calculators, a 529 savings planner, citation generation, and a real .docx format checker — the practical side of paying for and writing through college.
College involves two very different kinds of work: figuring out how to pay for it, and actually writing the papers once you're there. We built tools for both.
Paying for it
The College Cost Calculator estimates total cost of attendance across multiple years — tuition, room and board, books, and fees — with an annual increase rate and any scholarships netted out. If loans are already in the picture, the Student Loan Calculator shows your standard monthly payment, payoff time, and total interest, and models what paying extra each month actually saves you.
If you're saving ahead of time instead, the 529 Savings Calculator works backward from a goal amount and a timeline to tell you the monthly contribution you'd actually need.
Writing the papers
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The Citation Generator covers APA, MLA, Chicago, and Harvard styles across websites, books, and journal articles, and builds an alphabetized reference list as you go.
The Paper Format Checker actually reads your .docx file's real margins, font, and line spacing and checks them against APA, MLA, or Chicago requirements — not a guess based on word count, an actual read of the document's formatting.
One honesty note: our Text Similarity Checker compares two texts you provide against each other — it has no connection to the internet or any academic database, so it's useful for comparing your own drafts or checking against a specific source, but it is not a substitute for your school's actual plagiarism-detection tool.