Funding disclosure · last reviewed 2026-09-13
Is TruthPathMS actually independent?
Yes, and the way to check a claim like that is to look at where the money comes from rather than at how firmly the claim is made. So here is the whole thing.
An independent, student-paid, zero-university-commission decision platform for Indian students choosing a Master's programme abroad.
Where our money comes from
| Source | Amount |
|---|---|
Commission from universities We are not an agent for any institution and have no agreement with any of them. | ₹0 |
Commission from agents or consultants We do not refer students to consultants and take nothing when one is hired. | ₹0 |
Commission or referral fees from lenders The bank-recognition tool links to lenders' own documents. We are not a loan broker. | ₹0 |
Paid placement in results or rankings No university can pay to appear, to rank higher, or to have a risk flag removed. | ₹0 |
University advertising or sponsorship We sell no advertising of any kind. | ₹0 |
Students who buy a report This is our only revenue. One-time, no subscription. | ₹999 |
One line in that table has a number in it. That is the entire design: the only party whose interests we are paid to serve is the one reading the report.
Why this is the thing to check
Most study-abroad advice in India is free to the student because a university pays for it. That is legal, extremely common, and usually disclosed somewhere in the small print. It is also a structural conflict: an adviser paid per enrolment earns more when you enrol, and earns nothing when the honest answer is "none of these are worth the loan".
We are not claiming the people in that model are dishonest. We are pointing out that you cannot tell from the outside, and that you should not have to. Paying us removes the question: there is no university on earth that gains or loses anything from what your scorecard says.
The blunt questions
Who pays TruthPathMS?
Students, and only students. The report costs ₹999, one time, with no subscription and no other paid tier. That payment is the entire business model. No university, agent, consultant or lender pays us anything, in any form.
Can a university pay to rank higher in my results?
No. The ranking is produced by a disclosed, rule-based formula run against a dataset we publish in full. There is no field in that dataset that money could change, and no mechanism by which a payment could reach the scoring code.
Can a university pay to have a risk flag removed?
No. Risk flags are generated from the programme's own data - visa policy, cost against your budget, the admission bar. A university that dislikes its flag has the same recourse as anyone else: show us a source that contradicts ours and we will correct it publicly, as we have before.
Do you earn anything if I apply or enrol somewhere?
Nothing. This is the single most important difference between us and a commission-funded consultant, whose income depends on where you end up. We are paid the same whether you go to your top choice, your last choice, or decide not to go abroad at all.
Do you earn anything from the education loan tools?
No. The bank-recognition checker reads lenders' own published lists and links to their source documents. We are not a lending service, a loan broker or a referral partner, and we receive nothing if you take a loan.
What is your incentive, then?
To be right often enough that students pay for the next report and tell other students. That incentive is not perfectly aligned with yours - we want you to buy - but it does not depend on which university you choose, which is the bias that matters in this industry.
How would I know if you were lying about this?
You partly wouldn't, and we would rather say so than pretend otherwise. What you can check: the dataset is published in full with sources per row, the scoring formula is disclosed, the changelog records our own errors including ones nobody would have caught, and every figure carries a date. A site being paid to steer you does not usually publish the material that would expose it.
What you can check yourself
Independence is easy to assert. These are the things we publish specifically so the assertion is testable:
- The full dataset - every verified programme as CSV and JSON under CC BY 4.0, each row carrying its own sources and check date. Download it and audit the numbers against the universities' own pages.
- How we label data - the difference between a figure we verified, one we estimated, and one we could not establish at all. Including a list of the data we tried to get and failed.
- The changelog - including corrections where we had something wrong and said so, such as the H-1B fee we described as a settled cost when it had been vacated by a court.
- Outcome calibration - real self-reported admits and rejects, with an honest count of how little of it has been verified against a document.
Start with the free half
The assessment, the shortlist check and every calculator are free and ask for no phone number. Decide whether the paid report is worth ₹999 after you have seen how we work.
Get My Free Assessment →