What it costs
You pay for a license. Not for your coursework.
Your syllabi, your assignments, your deadlines: parsed on your own machine, kept on your own machine. None of it ever reaches a Margin server. What money buys here is access to the software, never a copy of your academic life.
A paid tier on a privacy-first brand only makes sense if the line is clear, so here it is. Parsing, capture, and change-tracking all run client-side. The only thing our server ever sees is a license check and, through the payment processor, a name and email for billing. No syllabi. No assignment titles. No due dates. No grades.
That is the privacy promise and the FERPA posture in one sentence: no student educational records leave the device, so we never become a keeper of them. The pass is a gate, not a data grab. The full data flow is on the privacy page.
01Preview
Preview
Free
No account, no card
A taste of the calm, before you decide.
- Paste or upload a syllabus and see the full-semester view render.
- A mockup of what one-click export would look like.
- The first couple of weeks shown; the full term is gated.
- Writes nothing. Captures nothing. Reads no LMS.
The preview is the parse you can see for yourself, which is why the parse isn't the thing you pay for.
02Margin Pass
Margin Pass
$19.99
Per semester · non-renewing
The whole term, captured and watched, for one term.
- Real one-click export to Todoist, no mockup.
- Multi-LMS auto-capture, due dates included.
- Whole-semester foresight, past the LMS calendar's two-week horizon.
- The calm side-panel, and change-tracking when a professor moves a date.
- Your coursework still never leaves your device.
It does not auto-renew. When the term ends, we send one honest email and let it lapse.
03The device
Margin device
$189
One time · software included
The rung that ends the paying.
- The e-paper desk dashboard, hand-assembled and numbered.
- The software is included; there's no pass to renew.
- The list lives off the laptop, on a screen that doesn't glow.
- Everything the pass does, on a device built to outlast a degree.
$189 expected; pre-orders 2027 via a small Kickstarter, first fifty summer 2028. The number we're building toward.
What you actually pay for.
The free Preview already renders the parse, so the parse is not the sale. Two things you can't get for free:
- Whole-semester foresight. Your LMS calendar only looks about two weeks ahead. Parsing the syllabus surfaces the whole term, including the readings and exam weeks named only in prose that no LMS feed ever holds.
- Change-tracking. A syllabus is a static upload; when the professor moves the midterm, the change shows up in the LMS, not in a re-uploaded PDF. Margin Pass diffs your captures over time and tells you what moved — all of it on your machine, by design.
You're paying for the ongoing vigilance, not the one-time import. Honest edge: change-tracking is per-device and can't see changes from before you installed it. We label it that way in the app rather than pretend it caught something it couldn't have.
Why a pass that ends.
Margin Pass is $19.99 a semester and does not renew. We'd rather email you at the end of term and let you decide again than bill a card you forgot about over the summer. A pass that quietly renews is the thing we're trying not to be.
The device is the rung where the paying stops. Buy one and the software comes with it: no pass, no renewal, nothing to remember. To be straight about the math, a per-semester pass won't recoup $189 inside a degree, so the device isn't a money-saving upgrade. It's a different thing entirely — the list off your laptop, on a screen that sits on your desk and doesn't glow. When the Pass goes on sale, that's the rung we'll sell first; the device is the one we're building toward.
Where the money meets the server.
Paying creates exactly one thing on our side: an entitlement that says your license is current. Checkout will run through a merchant-of-record (the company that handles the tax, the receipt, and the refund), which passes us a name and email so the license can follow you across sign-ins. That's the entire footprint of a purchase.
No syllabus, assignment, due date, or grade is part of that. The privacy page lists, line by line, what each integration touches and where every piece of data lives. The short version is the one at the top of this page: you pay for a license; your coursework never touches our servers.
Not ready to pay anything?
The preview is free and it stays free. Start there, see the calm for yourself, and pay only if the foresight earns it.