What this costs.
Most of it is nothing. The rest is priced on this page before it is for sale, because a site built on “nobody would give me a number” cannot then decline to give you one.
Almost everything here is free and stays free. What is not free is on this page with its price already attached, because a site built on “nobody would give me a number” cannot then decline to give you one.
The line we will not cross: reading is free, tools are paid. Nothing that helps you understand your own divorce will ever sit behind a payment. If it ever does, that is the day this site stopped being worth using and you should say so.
The short version4 points · tap one to jump to it
- What things cost — All the reading stays free.
- What paying over time costs, at every seller we could price
- Five things we will not do — If we ever offer installments, four payments will add up to exactly the one payment.
- How we actually plan to make money — Certification for professionals, the kits, and a membership for the tools.
In this subject 4
What things cost
The short version4 points · tap one to jump to it
- What things cost — All the reading stays free.
- What paying over time costs, at every seller we could price
- Five things we will not do — If we ever offer installments, four payments will add up to exactly the one payment.
- How we actually plan to make money — Certification for professionals, the kits, and a membership for the tools.
In this subject 4
A membership, for the tools
Or $99 for a year, which is two months free. Founding rate below.
All the reading stays free. Permanently. The fifty state guides, the cost data, the professional directory, the checklists, every page of it. A membership is for the things that cost us money to run rather than to write: saved progress on your checklists and lists, deadline reminders, the handout builder, sync across your devices, and an export you can take with you.
This is not on sale yet, and we are not taking your card. The things a membership pays for — saved progress, deadline reminders, the handout builder, sync across devices, an export you can take with you — are being built and are not finished. We are not going to charge you for them before they work.
You can hold the founding rate now. Tell us where to reach you and $79 a year is yours for as long as your membership runs unbroken, starting the day it works. No card, no charge, and no cancellation to remember. We will write to you when it opens and about nothing else.
A membership is your file on your divorce — the whole of it, including the part before you were sure and the part after the paperwork is done. It is not tied to a state, a filing or a court date, because most of this is not. A kit is the other thing: your file on one case — one state, one filing, one set of deadlines a judge set. Most people want one or the other. If you want both, members pay less for a kit.
We do not store your documents, and there is no plan to. Not your tax returns, not your bank statements, not your court papers, not your ID — there is no document vault here and there will not be one. A checklist records that you have your 2024 tax return. It never holds the return. Anything you save here is a note about your own progress, and if you turn on syncing it is encrypted on your device before it reaches us, with a key we do not have and cannot be given.
If you never pay us anything, you are not getting a worse version of this site. You are getting the same site without a place to keep your own work in it.
- Cancel any time, in one email. Write to hello@thecusp.app and it is done that day. No phone call and no retention offer.
- No refunds — and here is exactly what that means. If you cancel, you keep full access to the date you have already paid to. A year bought in March runs to the following March whether you cancel in April or not. We do not claw anything back and we do not bill you again.
- We will remind you seven days before an annual renewal. Nobody should discover a $99 charge they forgot about, and the honest way to prevent that is a reminder rather than a refunds process.
- Your account does not need your real name. Choose any name you like. We do not ask who you are and we would rather not know.
Founding membership
Anyone who subscribes before 31 December 2026 pays $79 a year, and keeps that price for as long as the membership runs unbroken — not for the first year, for all of them.
There is no monthly founding rate. Monthly stays $9.99 whenever you join, which is a nudge toward the annual and we would rather say so than pretend otherwise.
We are not going to invent a countdown or tell you places are running out. The date is the date, and if we ever extend it we will say on this page that we did. If the paid tools are not open by 31 December 2026, we will move the date to match the day they open and say so here, so nobody pays for tools that do not exist yet.
The whole site
Not free-for-now, not free-until-launch. This is the part that has to stay free, because the entire reason this site exists is that nobody would give one straight answer about money.
- Fifty state divorce guides — forms, deadlines, residency rules, and where a filing gets rejected
- Fifty-one cost pages — the filing fee traced to the statute that sets it, and linked to it
- What people actually report paying, gathered from people who went through it
- The professional directory — credentials checked against official state records
- Prenups, postnups, the checklist and the annotated clauses
- E-filing rules, which took a research pass most states do not make easy
- Buddy connections — matched with one person going through it too, both anonymous
Divorce kits
Reading a state’s process stays free. The routes, the forms, what each stage costs, the disclosure categories, and the state’s own free copy of every form — that is the part nobody should have to pay for, and it is not moving.
What we are building, and will charge for, is the kit that fills itself in. Enter the date you filed and every deadline computes, with a calendar file that reminds you a week before and the day before. The seventeen disclosure categories become a tracker that remembers what you have already found. The rejection-proofing list becomes something you tick rather than something you read. It saves, so it is still there next week.
$79 for one state, paid once. $59 with an annual membership. Never a subscription, and never a charge that repeats — a kit you buy is yours. It is not on sale yet, because the kit itself is not finished. We used to say here that it was waiting on accounts, and that was wrong — a document you buy once needs no account at all, and saying otherwise put a technical excuse in front of an editorial problem. What it is waiting on is the document. Connecticut is being written first, because that is a state we actually work in, and we would rather be wrong about forms nowhere than in fifty places at once. We are telling you the price now rather than after.
The discount is not a reason to join. An annual membership is $99 and takes $20 off a kit. $99 plus $59 is $158; the kit on its own is $79. If a kit is the only thing you want, buy the kit — the membership costs $99 to save you $20. The member price is for people who were going to be members anyway, and it does not apply to monthly memberships.
Every kit carries the same disclosure it carries today: it is a guide to a court process, it is not legal advice, and it is not a substitute for a lawyer. The court forms themselves will remain free and we will keep linking to the state’s own copy of them, whatever happens to the kit. You will never need anything from us to get the forms.
Divorce real estate training, for agents
We could charge for this and decided not to. Charging agents to enter a referral network inverts the incentive — the moment enrollment is the revenue you optimize for signups rather than for clients, and you end up with three hundred agents who paid and no work to give them.
So it is free, joining is free, and staying is free. Seven modules and twenty questions, about forty-five minutes. An agent who passes is certified, and that certification costs nothing and cannot be bought. The one thing an agent can buy, afterwards and optionally, is an annual license to display our mark — $149 a year, which buys marketing material and not one referral. We are paid only through a referral fee on a completed sale, which is disclosed on the page where anyone can ask for an introduction.
The certification mark, for agents who passed
What this is not: it is not the certification, which is free and has to be earned by passing the assessment. It is not a place on a panel, which is free and cannot be bought by anybody at any price. It buys you no referrals at all.
What it is: an annual license to use our mark in your own marketing, with the media kit — social graphics sized for each platform, a client one-pager on what is different about a divorce sale, a listing-presentation slide, and an email signature block. All of it carries our address, which is the honest reason it is worth our while.
The mark carries its expiry date on its face. A license that lapses stops asserting anything, on the agent’s own website, without us having to ask them for anything.
What paying over time costs, at every seller we could price
This is the one thing in this market that surprised us most, so it gets its own table. These are each seller’s own published cash price and their own published installment plan. The arithmetic is ours; check it.
| Seller | Pay once | Pay over time | Difference | How |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Divorce.com — We File For You | $999 | $1,299 | +$300 (30% more) | 4 payments of $324.75. |
| Hello Divorce — Pro | $2,000 | $2,300 | +$300 (15% more) | Paid over four months. |
| Hello Divorce — Plus | $3,500 | $4,000 | +$500 (14% more) | Paid over four months. |
| 3StepDivorce | $299 | $336 | +$37 (12% more) | Four installments. |
| CDC Certified Divorce Coach | $3,800 | $3,420 | −$380 (10% less) | Discounts 10% for paying up front, rather than surcharging finance. The only one in the set that does. |
Read from each seller’s published pricing page on 20 August 2026. Prices change, and by the time you read this some of these may have. The point is not any one company — it is that in four of five cases the advertised price is not the price a customer who needs to spread payments pays, and divorce is precisely the moment when a person needs to spread payments.
Five things we will not do
Written down so you can hold us to them.
If we ever offer installments, four payments will add up to exactly the one payment. Look at the table above and you will see why this needed saying out loud.
The membership above is the only recurring charge on this site, it says so before you pay, and you start it deliberately. Everything else is a one-time purchase. Nothing here converts into a monthly charge after a trial window, and there is no trial that becomes a bill. A divorce takes months, and a price that quietly repeats across those months is not the price you were shown. If you buy something here once, once is what it costs.
Not attorneys, not mediators, not therapists, not agents. Every credential in it was checked against the issuing board’s own record. Payment cannot buy a listing, a position, or a badge. Being listed is free, and it is the only thing that decides where you appear. A professional can pay for an expanded profile — more room to say who they are, their fees, the courts they appear in. That is their advertisement, and it moves them nowhere. Separately, moving companies, storage operators and move managers can buy a place in a strip marked Paid placement, outside the ranked results, which we do not vet. Everything anyone can buy from us is named on this page, and all of it is set out in full on how we make money.
Every court form linked anywhere on this site is published free by the state. You never have to buy anything from us, or from anyone else, to get them. If we ever charge for a kit, we are charging for the guide around the forms — never for the forms.
We take no referral fees from professionals in the directory. If that ever changes, it will be disclosed on the listing itself, not in a footer.
How we actually plan to make money
The short version, in case you would rather know than guess.
Certification for professionals, the kits, and a membership for the tools. We do not sell your data and we never will — that is the one that is not negotiable. On advertising we have moved, and would rather say so than let you find out: there is now a single paid category, for movers and storage, labeled as paid and kept out of every ranked result on the site. The referral fee is running now — if we introduce you to a real estate agent and that sale completes, that agent’s brokerage pays us a share of their commission. In Fairfield County, Connecticut and Palm Beach County, Florida — the two counties Hyleri actually works — there is no referral fee, because she may be your agent herself, which is a larger interest and not a smaller one. Everywhere else, including the rest of Connecticut and Florida, the referral fee applies. The whole arrangement is set out here. A paid membership tier is possible and is not running today. If that changes, this page changes first — and the longer version lives here.