Going Merry Is Shutting Down — Here's How to Keep Tracking Deadlines

If you're reading this, you probably just found out that Going Merry shut down in March 2026. After serving 2 million students and partnering with 20,000 counselors across 50% of US high schools, the scholarship platform stopped accepting new applications on March 5, 2026.

For families who relied on Going Merry to find and apply for scholarships, this is a real loss. The auto-fill feature that let students apply to multiple scholarships with a single profile was genuinely useful. But the platform is gone, and you need a plan.

What Going Merry Did Well

Going Merry's strength was simplifying scholarship applications. You created one profile, wrote a few essays, and the platform matched you with scholarships and auto-filled applications. In 2024 alone, 360,000 students used it to secure $8.8 million in scholarships.

But Going Merry had a gap: it only helped with scholarships, not planning. It didn't tell you when to start preparing for college. It didn't track the deadlines for gifted programs, magnet schools, or military academy nominations. It didn't give you a year-by-year roadmap.

What to Do Now

Here's what we recommend for families affected by the shutdown:

For Scholarship Search

• Fastweb and Scholarships.com remain the largest free scholarship databases
• Niche offers scholarship matching alongside their school rankings (70 million annual users)
• CollegeVine has a free scholarship search tool alongside their admissions chancing engine
• Your school counselor likely has a local scholarship list — ask for it directly

For Deadline Tracking — The Bigger Problem

Scholarship deadlines are just one type of deadline. The ones that hurt most are the ones you didn't know existed:

• The gifted program application window that closed while you were settling into a new school
• The magnet school lottery deadline that passed because no one told you it existed
• The West Point nomination timeline that starts years before most families realize
• The vocational program enrollment period that fills up months before the school year

These aren't scholarship deadlines. These are life-path deadlines— and missing them can change your child's trajectory in ways that are hard to undo.

How Launchpad Helps

Launchpadwas built to solve this exact problem. You enter your student's grade, their goal (college, military, vocational, career, magnet school), and your ZIP code. Launchpad generates a personalized, year-by-year roadmap with every deadline mapped out — working backward from the goal to today.

What makes it different from what Going Merry offered:

• Backward planning — starts with where your child wants to end up and works backward to what they should be doing right now
• All goal types — not just college. Military academies, vocational programs, magnet schools, career paths
• ZIP code personalization — deadlines and opportunities specific to your area
• K-12 coverage — not just junior and senior year. If your child is in 3rd grade, Launchpad can start planning now
• Deadline alerts — email notifications so you never miss a window

Especially for Military Families

Going Merry had no military family awareness. If you PCS every 2-3 years, every move resets your knowledge of local deadlines, programs, and requirements. Launchpad was built by a veteran who lived this — a 14-year Special Forces soldier whose son missed a gifted program deadline after a PCS to Northern Virginia.

When you move, update your ZIP code in Launchpad. Your child's goal stays the same. The roadmap adapts to your new location.

Going Merry served millions of families well. Its shutdown is a reminder that the tools we rely on can disappear — but the deadlines don't. Try Launchpad free and make sure you never miss the deadline that changes everything.