Features
Aspen chat
Aspen is the AI assistant inside Aspen ESA. You can ask Aspen anything about the Arizona ESA program — what's eligible, how reimbursements work, what to do if a purchase gets denied, how to think about a curriculum decision — and Aspen will answer with grounded references to the actual ESA Parent Handbook. Every answer that uses the handbook cites the specific section, like `[§3.2 Curriculum Materials]`, so you can verify the source. Aspen is honest about uncertainty: when something is genuinely a judgment call, you'll hear that, not made-up rules.
Pre-purchase eligibility check
Before you spend, you can describe a purchase to Aspen ("a $300 microscope kit for my 7th grader") and get a structured answer: a verdict (likely approved / likely denied / unclear), a confidence level, the relevant handbook sections, the documentation you should attach to the ClassWallet submission, and tips for maximizing approval. It's the difference between guessing and knowing before you put your card down.
Receipt capture and tracking
You can upload a photo or PDF of any ESA-related receipt, and Aspen ESA will store it permanently in your account — including receipts from purchases that ClassWallet doesn't track (like Direct Pay invoices and cash purchases). Each receipt is linked to a specific kid, a category, and optionally a specific curriculum or resource. Your records stay yours forever, even if your kid eventually ages out of the ESA program.
Receipt categorization with AI
When you upload a receipt, Aspen ESA uses AI to read the image, extract the vendor name, amount, date, and line items, and suggest a category (Curriculum, Tutoring, Music & Arts, Technology, etc.). It also drafts a short eligibility justification you can use when submitting to ClassWallet — saving you from writing it from scratch every time. You always get to review and edit the parsed details before saving.
The receipts library
All your saved receipts live in a searchable, filterable library. You can filter by kid, by category, by date range, or by status. You can search by vendor name. Click any receipt to see the original image, the parsed details, the AI-drafted justification, and any tagged resource. It's the receipt drawer ClassWallet doesn't give you.
The budget dashboard
The budget dashboard shows you, per kid, how much of your ESA award has been spent year-to-date, how much remains, and a category breakdown of where the money has gone. The dashboard runs on the official Arizona ESA school year (July through June). If you have multiple kids on ESA, you also see a cross-kid summary — something ClassWallet makes nearly impossible because each kid has a separate ClassWallet account.
The curriculum directory
Aspen ESA includes a curated directory of curricula commonly used by Arizona ESA families — math (Saxon, Singapore, Math-U-See, Beast Academy, Teaching Textbooks, and more), language arts (IEW, All About Reading, The Good and the Beautiful, Brave Writer), science, history, all-in-one packages (Sonlight, Memoria Press, Classical Conversations), online programs (Outschool, IXL, Time4Learning), and special-needs programs (Barton, Wilson). Each listing shows grade range, subject focus, teaching style, religious tone, typical price range, and how families use it.
Receipt-verified parent reviews
This is what makes Aspen ESA different. To leave a review on a curriculum, you must have an actual receipt for it tied to your account — no exceptions. Every review carries a "Verified purchase" badge and reflects a real family who actually bought and used what they're rating. No fake reviews, no astroturfing, no anonymous internet opinions from people who never tried the product. When you read a review on Aspen ESA, you know it's from someone who lived it.
Aspen recommendation mode
When you're trying to find a curriculum for a specific kid, you can ask Aspen for a recommendation. Tell Aspen what you're looking for ("a math curriculum for my 4th grader who's good at reading but struggles with mental arithmetic") and you'll get three personalized picks. Each pick comes with a reason it might fit, what verified parents with similar kids said about it, the typical price range, and any caveats. Recommendations are grounded in real reviews from real families — Aspen never invents fits.
Optional kid profiles for better matches
If you want to get more personalized recommendations and reviews, you can fill out an optional profile for each kid: reading level, math level, learning profile (e.g., dyslexia, ADHD, gifted, neurotypical), interests, teaching style preferences, and religious tone preference. All of this is optional and private to you by default. You decide whether to share an anonymized descriptor (e.g., "Parent of a 4th grader with dyslexia in the Phoenix area") on reviews you write, or whether Aspen uses the profile to filter recommendations. Both are toggles you control.
In-app notifications and review prompts
About 30 days after you tag a receipt with a specific curriculum, Aspen ESA will gently nudge you to leave a review. The notification appears on your dashboard and (when you have the mobile app installed) as a push notification. You can dismiss any prompt you're not ready for. The reason we ask after 30 days: it's enough time to have an honest opinion, but recent enough that the experience is fresh.
Feedback widget
Anywhere in the app, you can use the "Send feedback" button in the navigation to send the Aspen ESA team a bug report, feature idea, or question. We read every submission. We can't always respond personally, but the feedback shapes what we build next.
Comparisons
Aspen ESA vs ClassWallet
ClassWallet is the official platform Arizona requires for ESA fund disbursement. You're required to use ClassWallet — that's not a choice. Aspen ESA is the layer on top: we don't replace ClassWallet, we make it easier to live with. ClassWallet processes payments and stores some receipts (specifically, those attached to Reimbursement requests). Aspen ESA captures *all* your spending records (including Direct Pay invoices and cash purchases that never appear in ClassWallet), uses AI to extract details from receipts, organizes everything by kid and category, drafts the eligibility justifications you'd otherwise write from scratch, gives you a multi-kid budget view, helps you find good curricula via verified parent reviews, and prepares audit-ready records. ClassWallet is the cash register; Aspen ESA is the financial advisor and friend who knows the rules.
Do I still need ClassWallet if I have Aspen ESA?
Yes — ClassWallet is required by the state for actually moving ESA money. You'll always use ClassWallet to submit reimbursements, send Direct Pay invoices to vendors, or buy through MyScholarShop. Aspen ESA doesn't process any payments. Think of it this way: ClassWallet handles the money; Aspen ESA handles the decisions, the records, and the trust.
Aspen ESA vs the official ADE Parent Handbook
The Arizona ESA Parent Handbook is the official, legally definitive source for what's eligible, what's required, and how the program works. Aspen is trained on the most recently published handbook (currently the 2025–2026 edition) and cites specific sections in every response. We re-ingest each new handbook when ADE publishes it. So you can trust Aspen to ground answers in the real document — but for the most current and authoritative reading, the handbook itself (linked from the ADE website) is always the final word, especially as rules evolve.
Aspen ESA vs Numa
Numa is a homeschool management platform that includes some ESA tracking features. It serves homeschool families primarily, with a focus on curriculum planning, attendance tracking, and transcript generation. Aspen ESA is built specifically as an ESA assistant for *all* Arizona ESA families — homeschool, private school, microschool, and hybrid — and we're AI-native from the ground up. Our differentiators are receipt-verified reviews, kid-profile-aware recommendations, and the conversational AI experience. The two products aren't direct substitutes; they're built around different visions.
Aspen ESA vs ChatGPT or other general AI
You could ask ChatGPT or another general-purpose AI about Arizona ESA, but you'd be getting an answer based on the model's training data — which may be months or years out of date and won't include the current Parent Handbook with section-level citations. Aspen is specifically grounded in the most recent handbook, knows the actual rules and forms, knows the AZ-specific terminology, and stays in scope (we redirect off-topic questions). For ESA decisions, you want an expert who knows the source material cold — that's Aspen.
How To And Troubleshooting
How do I add a kid?
You added your first kid during onboarding. To add another, open the menu and find "Manage kids" (or visit /kids), then click "Add a kid." You'll need: first name (or a nickname), grade level, school setting (homeschool, private school, microschool, hybrid, or public-with-supplements), and the ESA award amount for the year. You can edit any of this later.
How do I upload a receipt?
From the dashboard, click "Add receipt." Take a photo or upload a PDF. Aspen will read it and pre-fill the vendor, amount, date, and category. Pick which kid it's for, edit anything that's wrong, optionally tag it with a specific curriculum from our directory, and save. The receipt is now stored permanently in your library.
How do I tag a receipt with a curriculum?
When viewing a receipt detail page, look for "What was this for?" — start typing the curriculum name and pick from the autocomplete results. If the curriculum isn't in our directory yet, you can submit it via the "Can't find it?" link, and our team will review it. Tagging a receipt unlocks the ability to write a verified review of that curriculum 30 days later.
How do I write a review?
You can only write a review for a curriculum if you have a receipt linked to it (this is what makes our reviews verified). Go to the receipt detail page or the curriculum's resource page; if you're eligible, you'll see a "Write a review" button. The review form asks for a star rating, optional written review, how long you've been using it, whether you'd recommend it, and pros/cons. If you've opted in to sharing an anonymized descriptor, you can preview what it'll look like.
How do I opt into anonymized review descriptors?
Go to your kid's profile (under "Manage kids"), and you'll find a section called "Sharing on reviews." It's OFF by default. If you turn it on for that kid, when you write a review tied to that kid's receipt, your review can optionally show a fuzzy descriptor like "Parent of a 4th grader with dyslexia in Phoenix metro" — never names, never specific locations. You can preview exactly what would show before publishing.
How do I use Aspen's recommendation mode?
Visit the Resources section and click "Find me a curriculum" (or use the chat command "Help me find…"). Tell Aspen what you're looking for, including any details about your kid (or pick a kid you've already profiled). Aspen returns three picks based on real reviews from families with similar kids. You can ask follow-up questions or ask Aspen to look in a different direction.
What if a receipt got parsed wrong?
Our AI is fast but not perfect — sometimes it misreads a vendor name or grabs the wrong total. Click any field on the receipt detail page to edit it directly. Your edits save to your records immediately. If you notice a pattern of errors with receipts from a specific vendor, send us feedback and we'll improve the model.
What if Aspen's eligibility verdict seems wrong?
Aspen's verdicts are best-effort predictions grounded in the published handbook — they're not guarantees and ADE has the final word. If a verdict feels wrong, you can: ask Aspen a follow-up to dig deeper, check the cited handbook section yourself, or submit the question to ADE directly via their portal. If you find a verdict that was clearly wrong (the handbook says one thing and Aspen said another), please send feedback so we can fix the prompt.
How do I send feedback to the team?
Click the "Send feedback" button in the main navigation (it's available throughout the app). Pick a category — Bug, Idea, Question, or Other — and write your message. We read every submission and many shape what we build next.
Limitations And Honesty
Aspen is not a lawyer or state employee
Aspen is an AI assistant trained on publicly available materials — the ESA Parent Handbook, our own knowledge base, and verified parent reviews. Aspen explains rules; she doesn't make them. She can't speak for ADE or ClassWallet, and her answers don't constitute legal or official advice. For important decisions — especially anything involving a denied request, an audit, or a large purchase — confirm with ADE directly.
Always verify with ADE for important decisions
The Arizona ESA program is administered by the Arizona Department of Education, and they have the final word on every eligibility decision. Aspen's eligibility predictions are best-effort and grounded in the published handbook, but rules can be interpreted differently by different reviewers, and they change. For any purchase you're not sure about — especially expensive ones — submit a question to ADE directly through the official portal before you spend.
Reviews are parent-submitted, not professionally vetted
The reviews on Aspen ESA come from real Arizona ESA families who actually bought and used the curriculum (we enforce that with receipt verification). But they're parent opinions, not editorial reviews from a publication. A 5-star review is one family's experience with one kid; your family and your kid might respond differently. Use reviews as a strong signal, not a guarantee — and consider reading several reviews to get a fuller picture.
We update Aspen's knowledge each July when the new handbook is published
The Arizona Department of Education typically publishes a new ESA Parent Handbook each July for the upcoming school year. When that happens, we re-ingest the new handbook so Aspen is grounded in current rules. We try to do this within a week of publication. If you ask Aspen a question and rules feel out of date, drop us feedback and we'll make sure we've ingested the latest version.
What Aspen ESA won't do (intentionally)
We won't help you find loopholes or submit questionable purchases — we explain what's likely allowed, not how to game the system. We won't sell your data or run targeted ads, ever. We won't replace your judgment as a parent. We won't make ESA decisions for you. We won't pretend to know things we don't (when Aspen is uncertain, she'll say so). And we won't ever try to gate the basic free tier in a way that makes it useless without paying — a free Aspen ESA account should always actually help. *End of seed v1. ~30 chunks across about / features / pricing / comparisons / privacy / how-to / limitations. Ingest this file the same way the AZ ESA Parent Handbook gets ingested — chunk by H3 headings, embed at 1024 dim, store in a `kb_chunks` table parallel to `handbook_chunks`. Re-ingest when this file is updated.*
About Aspen Esa
What is Aspen ESA?
Aspen ESA is an AI-native assistant for Arizona families navigating the Empowerment Scholarship Account (ESA) program. The product is built around Aspen — an AI helper trained on the most recent Arizona ESA Parent Handbook — that helps you understand what your ESA dollars can buy, organize your receipts, find curricula that fit your kid, and stay on top of approvals and audits. We're not affiliated with the Arizona Department of Education or ClassWallet; we're an independent layer that sits on top of the official system to make using your ESA easier.
Who is Aspen ESA for?
Aspen ESA is built for Arizona families who use the Empowerment Scholarship Account (ESA) program — homeschool families, families using ESA funds for private school tuition, microschool families, and hybrid families who use ESA dollars to supplement another schooling arrangement. If you're navigating the ~$7,000–$8,000 per kid that AZ ESA provides each year and you've ever felt overwhelmed by the rules, the receipts, the approvals, or the choices — Aspen ESA was built for you.
Who's behind Aspen ESA?
Aspen ESA is built by Mark Breen, a longtime Arizona K–12 educator and district Chief Technology Officer. He started building it in April 2026 to solve problems he saw families struggling with around the ESA process — the 100+ page handbook, the unclear approvals, the audit anxiety, the lack of trustworthy reviews on what curriculum actually works. Aspen ESA is independent and family-owned. It's not backed by a state agency, a school district, a venture-capital firm, or a curriculum publisher.
Why does Aspen ESA exist?
The Arizona ESA program puts real money in families' hands and gives them real choice — but the experience of actually using it can be genuinely hard. The official rules are long and changing. ClassWallet, the required payment platform, doesn't help you decide what to buy. Reviews of curriculum and vendors are scattered across Facebook groups. Audits are rare today but the rules around them are tightening. We built Aspen ESA because we believe families navigating school choice deserve a trustworthy, intelligent companion that makes the whole process easier and more confident — not another bureaucratic hurdle.
Is Aspen ESA affiliated with the Arizona Department of Education?
No. Aspen ESA is an independent product. We're not part of the Arizona Department of Education, ClassWallet, or any state agency. We use the publicly available Arizona ESA Parent Handbook as our source of truth, and we explain published rules — but we're not a state-sanctioned tool. For important decisions, especially around eligibility or audits, we always recommend confirming with ADE directly.
Pricing Plans
What's free
The free tier of Aspen ESA is designed to be genuinely useful, not a teaser. It includes: Aspen chat (up to 20 messages per day) with full handbook citations; pre-purchase eligibility checks (up to 3 per day); curriculum recommendations from Aspen (1 per day); unlimited receipt uploads, storage, and AI categorization; the full curriculum directory and all reviews; one kid profile; the budget dashboard; in-app notifications. You can use Aspen ESA seriously without ever paying us a dollar.
What's included with Plus
The Plus tier (coming soon) is for families who want more from Aspen ESA, especially those managing ESA funds for multiple kids. Plus includes everything in free, plus: support for unlimited kids on one account; significantly higher daily caps on Aspen chat (200/day), eligibility checks (effectively unlimited), and recommendations (10/day); audit-ready PDF packet generation; family sharing with a second parent; advanced budget reports; and priority support. Pricing will be announced when Plus launches; we're currently inviting interested families to a waitlist.
Why we have daily limits on the free tier
Running an AI assistant costs real money — every Aspen chat is a request to a state-of-the-art language model, and the costs add up. The free tier limits exist so we can sustainably offer Aspen to anyone, indefinitely, without forcing every family to pay. If you find yourself bumping up against the limits regularly, that's a good signal that Plus is for you. If you only need to ask Aspen a few questions a week, the free tier should comfortably cover you.
When the free tier resets
Daily limits reset at midnight Phoenix time (which is also midnight Mountain Standard Time, since Arizona doesn't observe Daylight Saving). If you've used your 20 free chats today, you'll have a fresh 20 tomorrow morning. There's no rollover — unused capacity doesn't bank for later.
Why we built Aspen ESA this way
We chose freemium because we want Aspen ESA to be genuinely accessible to every Arizona ESA family, not just those who can afford a subscription. The free tier should always be useful enough to solve real problems. The paid tier should pay for itself in time saved or money preserved (better approvals, less audit risk, better curriculum decisions). If we ever feel like we're squeezing the free tier to push upgrades, we're doing it wrong — let us know via the feedback button.
Privacy Data Handling
How we handle your data
Your data lives in your private account and is yours. We never sell it to advertisers, brokers, schools, the state, or any third party. We never use it to train AI models for other companies. We never share it without your explicit permission. We collect only what we need to provide Aspen ESA's features. You can export your data or delete your account at any time from your settings — no email request required.
What we collect and why
We collect: your email and name (for your account); your kids' first names, grade levels, and school setting (so we can personalize the budget view and recommendations); the ESA award amount per kid (for the budget dashboard, you tell us this); receipts you upload (so we can store and organize them for you); your chat conversations with Aspen (so threads persist across visits); reviews and resource tags you create (so other families benefit). Optionally, if you choose, we collect kid-profile details like reading level or learning profile — only used for your recommendations unless you opt to share an anonymized descriptor on a review you write.
Your rights over your data
You can view all the data we have about you, edit any of it, export it as a file, or delete your account entirely — at any time, from your settings. Account deletion is real: we permanently remove your profile, kids, receipts, chat history, eligibility checks, reviews, and any other data tied to your account within 30 days. The only exception is anonymized aggregate statistics (like "X families use this curriculum") which contain no personal information by then.
Privacy for your kid's information
Your kid's name and details never appear in any public-facing part of Aspen ESA. Reviews don't show your kid's name. Recommendations don't show your kid's profile to anyone but you. If you opt in to including an anonymized descriptor on a review you write, that descriptor is fuzzy and never personally identifiable — for example, "Parent of a 4th grader with dyslexia in the Phoenix metro area" rather than any name, school, or address. The opt-in toggle is OFF by default; we ask explicitly.
What we never do
We never sell your data. We never share it with advertisers. We never share it with the Arizona Department of Education or ClassWallet (we have no data-sharing relationship with either). We never use AI tracking pixels or third-party analytics that profile users. We never read your private chat conversations to train models. We never let an admin look at your data without a logged reason. We never email you marketing without your explicit permission.