How we built Road2College—a web app that turns confusion into clarity for students choosing where to study

When High Stakes Meet Low Visibility

For students and families, choosing a college isn’t just a personal milestone—it’s a high-stakes financial decision with long-term impact. Yet, despite its importance, most people face this process without access to tools that clearly compare offers across institutions.

Is one offer truly better than another? Can a student afford the long-term cost of a particular choice? What makes one package more sustainable than another? These questions often go unanswered—not because the data doesn’t exist, but because it’s not readily available in a form that’s easy to understand.

Road2College set out to change that.

A Platform for Clear, Confident Decisions

Road2College approached Zarego with a clear mission: create a product that helps students compare financial aid packages and admissions offers in a side-by-side, intuitive way.

The challenge was not just technical—it was strategic. The platform had to:

• Handle complex data from multiple colleges
  
• Translate financial and academic information into actionable insights
  
• Scale to accommodate peak usage during application seasons
  
• Be friendly enough for students and families with varying tech literacy
  

And, crucially, the platform had to do this without a dedicated DevOps team, on a budget suited for a growing startup. That’s where our full-cycle product development process came in.

From Discovery to Deployment

We started with a collaborative Discovery phase to clarify user needs, data sources, and compliance requirements. From there, our team moved into design and development, applying our product thinking to ensure each step built toward clarity and usability.

Frontend: Clear, Accessible, Responsive

We designed the interface with React and Next.js to ensure fast performance and mobile responsiveness. The comparison engine allows users to input multiple college offers and get a side-by-side breakdown of key metrics—cost, aid, loan burden, and long-term projections.

Multi-level user accounts were implemented to support different use cases: individual students, counselors, and institutional partners. Each user sees the data and functionality relevant to them, without adding clutter or confusion.

Backend: Serverless, Scalable, Sustainable

On the backend, we deployed a serverless architecture built with AWS Lambda and Python. This approach offered several advantages:

• Scalability without overhead — the system automatically handles spikes in traffic during college admissions season
  
• Cost-efficiency — no need to pre-provision infrastructure or pay for idle compute time
  
• Security and maintainability — logic is encapsulated in discrete functions, allowing for easy updates
  

Our API-first design also ensures that Road2College can evolve—connecting to external tools like financial planning software or admissions CRMs as the platform grows.

Solving for Clarity in a Sea of Offers

Most college-bound students receive financial aid packages in different formats—some include grants and loans together, others list estimated costs vaguely, and very few include projections beyond the first year.

Road2College changes this by normalizing the data behind the scenes and presenting it in a clean, unified visual format.

• The comparison engine aggregates metrics across schools, adjusting for variables like location-based cost of living, tuition increases, and aid renewal conditions
  
• Interactive visualizations help users explore what their total cost of attendance might look like over four years—not just the first semester
  
• Real-time calculators show the implications of changing certain assumptions (e.g., taking a part-time job or living off-campus)
  

This combination of personalization, transparency, and interactivity is what makes Road2College stand out.

Built for Individuals and Institutions Alike

While the initial audience was individual students and families, we designed the platform to also serve institutions and educational organizations.

Admin dashboards allow for management of cohorts, analysis of anonymized user trends, and future integration of school-specific recommendation engines.

Features such as:

• Tiered permissions
  
• Secure data storage
  
• Batch upload of offers
  
• Multi-user access for schools or counselors
  

…ensure that Road2College isn’t just a consumer tool—it’s a robust SaaS platform ready for growth in the EdTech space.

Outcome: Tech That Makes a Tangible Impact

The platform launched successfully and is now helping thousands of students and families approach college admissions with greater confidence and clarity.

By offering data-driven insights in a digestible format, Road2College is transforming a traditionally emotional decision into one grounded in real numbers and long-term sustainability.

“With Road2College, we turned a complex decision into a clear, guided experience. It’s a great example of tech solving a real-world need.”
— Ignacio Oroná, CBO at Zarego

The client not only received a fully functional MVP within their timeline and budget—they now have a flexible, future-ready system that can scale alongside their user base.

What We Delivered

• A fully responsive React/Next.js web interface
  
• A scalable, serverless backend with AWS Lambda
  
• A robust API ecosystem ready for expansion
  
• Multi-tier user accounts and admin panels
  
• Real-time, personalized college offer comparison engine
  
• Secure handling of user data and institutional access
  

Let’s Talk About Your Platform Idea

If you’re building something that needs to turn complexity into clarity, we’d love to help. Whether you’re in education, finance, health, or another data-rich field—our team specializes in making the complex intuitive, and the invisible visible.

Let’s talk about what we can build together.