Straight answers.

An agency sells a service: they run the process for you, behind closed doors, for €3,000 to €5,000 that you only learn about after a “free assessment” call. Varsio sells you the data they work from: 2,053 tracked programs, roster history, coach contacts, and real cost estimates. You run the process yourself, with our tools and guidance, for €750 a year.

The trade is simple. They promise to do the work. We make you able to do it better, because you can see everything they see, and coaches would rather hear from you than from a middleman anyway.

Recruit includes your full ranked match list, 12,000+ coach work emails from official staff pages, and outreach drafts tailored to each coach. The free tier already includes your profile, the quiz, your top 3 matches, and the full browsable school dataset.

It is a subscription because the value does not stop at signing day. The data stays useful through transfers, coaching changes, and your whole US journey. A placement fee would also push us toward the agency model: charge big, promise big, hide the price. We would rather publish the number and earn the renewal.

No. And you should be skeptical of anyone who does. A “95% placement” claim usually means athletes who dropped out along the way were quietly removed from the math.

What we guarantee is honest inputs: accurate data on which rosters have openings, which coaches to contact, and what each school really costs. The outreach, the video, the grades, and the effort are yours. That is not a disclaimer, it is the model. Coaches recruit athletes, not agencies.

Smaller than the headlines. A “$40,000 scholarship” is a tuition discount off a sticker price almost nobody pays in full. The number that matters is what your family pays out of pocket per year after athletic and academic aid, and that ranges from a few thousand dollars at well-funded programs to well over $20,000 elsewhere.

Full rides are rare outside a handful of sports and divisions. Varsio computes the out-of-pocket estimate per school from published aid data, so you compare real prices, not marketing numbers.

Soccer, tennis, swimming, and golf, across NCAA Division I and Division II, NAIA, and NJCAA. That spread matters: some of the best value for international athletes sits outside the big-name D-I schools, at programs that publish generous, formula-based academic aid. More sports follow as the dataset grows.

From public sources: official team roster pages, staff directories, and US government education datasets. We never scrape behind logins or paywalls. Every record stores its source URL and a timestamp, so you can see where a fact came from and how fresh it is. Rosters are re-crawled on a schedule, with extra passes around season starts when they change most.

Your profile exists only with your explicit consent, is hosted in the EU, and is never sold. You can export or delete it at any time, and deletion requests to privacy@varsio.io are handled promptly.

If you are under 16, a parent or guardian must give consent before you can create a profile. Nothing about you is shared with coaches until you decide to reach out.

Ideally 12 to 18 months before you want to enroll. US coaches fill next season’s roster spots early, and you need time for outreach, the eligibility process, standardized tests, and the visa. Starting late is not fatal, openings appear all year, but starting early means you choose among offers instead of taking what is left.

Yes, and many do, since parents usually fund this. Everything in Varsio is readable by a parent: the match reasons, the cost estimates, the data behind each recommendation. There is no sales funnel designed to get past you. If your athlete is under 16, your consent is required anyway. The outreach itself should still come from the athlete, because that is who the coach is recruiting.

By email, from your own address. Recruit gives you the coach’s verified work email, a draft tailored to that program and your profile, and guidance on timing. You put your highlight video link in the subject and first line, keep it short, and follow up politely. It feels intimidating exactly once. Coaches read these emails every day, and a direct, well-researched message from an athlete stands out against agency mass mail.

Varsio gives you a structured checklist for the NCAA/NAIA eligibility process and the F-1 student visa: what documents you need, in what order, and when. It is guidance, not legal advice. For unusual cases, like non-standard transcripts or prior professional contracts, talk to your school’s international office or a qualified adviser. The checklist keeps the normal path on track.

Yes. Recruit is a yearly plan you can cancel any time, and it simply runs out at the end of the paid period. No placement clauses, no exit fees, no contract that outlives your recruiting process. If the product stops being useful, stop paying for it. That pressure on us is intentional.