A 15-year-old trying to figure out what to do with her life does not operate on a district procurement calendar. She has real decisions in front of her right now: which classes to take next year, whether college is worth the debt, what “AI is changing everything” actually means for the job she had in mind. She needs help with those decisions this semester. Not after a pilot, a budget cycle, and a school board vote.
Until now, that student could only use Orchard if her school had already signed up.
Today that changes. Orchard is now open for every student.
Anyone can create an account. Students. Parents. Counselors. Teachers. No school adoption required for individual access.
Every feature of Orchard is included in the free plan. No locked sections. No trial clock. On a free account, a student can:
Every student has access to the whole platform, not a fraction of it.
Every feature. Every student. Free.
Create a free Orchard account and start exploring careers, post-secondary pathways, and what actually comes after graduation.
Orchie is our AI career counselor, and it is the part of Orchard students return to most. It answers the question a career quiz never can: “I am interested in this. What would that actually look like for someone like me, and what do I do next?”
Orchie runs on credits, because every conversation, custom exploration, and personalized plan costs real dollars to produce with AI. The free plan includes a one-time grant of 50 credits, which is enough to have a genuine back-and-forth with Orchie, work through an interest properly, and decide whether it is worth more.
Orchard+ adds 500 credits that refresh every month, comparable to what a student receives when their school adopts Orchard. Schools and districts get that same monthly allotment for every student, plus counselor and administrator dashboards, district-level Career Readiness Index™ reporting, SSO through Google, Clever, or ClassLink, and implementation support for teachers and counselors.
We started Orchard because choosing the wrong career is a universal problem. It always has been. What is different now is the pace.
The AI transformation of the workforce is rewriting job descriptions faster than any guidance system in K-12 can keep up with. A student choosing a path today is choosing against a labor market that will look meaningfully different by the time they graduate. That makes good career guidance more valuable than it has ever been, and the shortage of it more expensive for the students who go without.
We hope to see the majority of schools across the U.S. and beyond adopt Orchard in the coming years. But we know that will take time, and millions of students need to plan their future right now. While we believe school adoption is one of the best ways to reach the most students, restricting a student or parent’s ability to access Orchard without institutional adoption was never a good enough answer. It was always just the starting point.
“Orchard is in the rare ten percent of EdTech that can actually prove it moved a student.”
Parents can create their own account and work through it alongside their teenager, which tends to produce a far better conversation than “have you thought about what you want to do?”
Counselors and teachers can create an account as well and see exactly what students would experience, before anyone starts a conversation about a school license. If you have been asked to evaluate career readiness tools and you are tired of sitting through demos to find out what a product actually does, this is the shortest path to an answer.
Opening up the platform is a significant step toward Orchard’s larger vision, but it is not the finish line. Expect much more from us in the months ahead to help students navigate a future that keeps moving.
For now, the barrier is gone. If you know a student who is trying to figure out what comes next, they can start today.
Bring Orchard to every student in your school
A site license gives every student 500 Orchie credits every month, plus counselor and administrator dashboards, district-level Career Readiness Index reporting, SSO, and implementation support.
Yes. Every student can create a free Orchard account, and every feature of the platform is included. There are no locked sections and no trial clock. Students can explore hundreds of careers, browse thousands of post-secondary options, watch day-in-the-life videos, build an action plan, and track their Career Readiness Index without paying anything.
The only metered part of the platform is Orchie, our AI career counselor, which runs on credits. Free accounts include a one-time grant of 50 Orchie credits. Everything else is unlimited on the free plan.
No. Individual access no longer requires school adoption. Any student, parent, counselor, or teacher can create an account directly and start using Orchard immediately.
School and district site licenses are still available, and they add things an individual account cannot provide: 500 Orchie credits per student every month, counselor and administrator dashboards, district-level Career Readiness Index reporting, SSO through Google, Clever, or ClassLink, and professional development for staff.
Orchie is Orchard’s AI career counselor, and each conversation with Orchie uses credits because it runs on real AI compute. Free accounts receive a one-time grant of 50 credits, which is enough to explore an interest in depth and see how Orchie works.
When credits run out, the rest of Orchard keeps working exactly as before. Career exploration, post-secondary research, day-in-the-life videos, planning tools, the journal, and Career Readiness Index tracking are all unaffected. Students who want ongoing AI guidance can upgrade to Orchard+ for 500 credits that refresh every month, or get the same monthly allotment for free if their school adopts Orchard.
Yes. The free plan is open to anyone, not only students. Parents often create an account to work through career exploration alongside their teenager, which makes for a more productive conversation than asking what they want to do after graduation.
Counselors and teachers can create an account to see exactly what the student experience looks like before starting any conversation about a school license. It is the fastest way to evaluate whether Orchard fits your students.
The Career Readiness Index™ is a personalized score that measures how prepared a student is for life after graduation. Rather than tracking a single proxy metric like CTE enrollment or graduation rate, it reflects the actual work a student has done: exploring careers, researching pathways, building a plan, and developing relevant skills.
Students can see and track their own score on the free plan. Schools and districts with a site license also get aggregate Career Readiness Index reporting, which lets them see how career readiness is moving across a grade, a school, or an entire district. In addition, Orchard gives teachers and counselors the tools to identify which students need intervention to stay on track, and exactly what they can do to help.