If you have landed here after typing "is CourseCompass legit" into Google, that is a sensible thing to check. Paying for anything online is a leap of faith, and the internet is full of career quizzes dressed up as science. This page is written by us, deliberately, so you can judge for yourself. Everything below is a plain statement of fact about how we operate, including the parts that are less flattering.
Who actually runs CourseCompass
CourseCompass is an Irish education platform, built and operated in Ireland, and founded in Limerick by Stephen McKeon. We are not an anonymous overseas website: you can read about the founder on our author page, see our coverage on the press page, and email a person at info@coursecompass.ie.
Our work has been covered by Bank of Ireland's ThinkBusiness, Careers and Education News, the University of Limerick, Live 95 and iRadio. That coverage is not a scientific endorsement of our assessments; it is evidence that there is a named, contactable Irish business behind this website.
How payments work
Students and families pay through Revolut Pay. Schools are invoiced through Stripe. Both are regulated payment providers, which means your card details are entered on their infrastructure and never touch ours. We do not store card numbers.
Prices are shown in full on the pricing page before you buy. There is no subscription, no auto-renewal and no drip of upsell emails: you buy an assessment or a bundle once and it stays unlocked in your account. Individual assessments start at €4.99 and the largest bundle is €90 for the complete platform. If any of that does not match what you see at checkout, do not pay - email us.
Data protection and parental consent
We operate under GDPR and Irish data protection law. We collect the minimum we need to run assessments: name, email, date of birth, school details where relevant, and your answers. We do not ask for gender, race or a mobile number, we do not sell data to anyone, and non-essential cookies are only set after you give consent through the banner (you can change that at any time via "Cookie settings" in the footer).
Because a lot of our users are 15, 16 and 17, we require parental or guardian consent for anyone under 18 before personal data is processed, and we keep a timestamped record of it. You can request a copy of your data or its deletion, and you have the right to complain to Ireland's Data Protection Commission. The full detail is in our privacy statement and data protection page.
Where we deliberately stay in our lane
Our terms include an educational scope declaration in line with Department of Education Circular 0035/2017. In plain English: CourseCompass provides educational guidance information. It is not counselling, therapy or a clinical or diagnostic assessment, and it does not replace a registered guidance counsellor. If a school uses us, we sit alongside the counsellor's work rather than in place of it - that is how the schools who use us want it too.
The other honest caveat: our results are only as good as your answers. Every assessment we run is self-report, so if you answer as the person you think you should be rather than the person you are, the output will describe a stranger. We say more about that in how accurate CourseCompass is.
Refunds and support
We refund purchases where an assessment has been paid for but not yet started, or where a technical fault on our side stopped you getting what you paid for. Email info@coursecompass.ie within 14 days of purchase and we will sort it. Once an assessment has been completed and the AI report generated, the work has been done and delivered, so we cannot refund it - which is exactly why we publish free sample results for every assessment first. Read a sample, then decide.
How to check us out for yourself
1. Read a real sample report before paying anything.
2. Skim the methodology to see which frameworks each assessment is built on.
3. Try a free tool with no account needed, like the CAO points guide and calculator.
4. Check the pricing page and the FAQ.
5. Email us a hard question. We answer.