Frequently Asked Questions

Resident Insider is a platform that connects verified medical students with verified residents for anonymous, paid messaging. Students get honest, unfiltered advice about residency programs, and residents earn money for sharing their experience.

Yes. Names are never shown on either side. A resident sees your question and a "Verified Student" badge, never your name, email, or school. You see a resident's program and specialty, bio, and rating under a "Verified Resident" badge, never their name, email, or NPI number. What we use to verify an account is never shown in a conversation.

Resident Insider covers two degree tracks: Medicine (MD/DO) — ACGME-accredited residency programs across 47 specialties, including combined and dual-track residencies such as Internal Medicine/Pediatrics (Med-Peds), Internal Medicine/Psychiatry, and Pediatrics/Emergency Medicine. Major specialties include Internal Medicine, Family Medicine, Pediatrics, Psychiatry, Emergency Medicine, General Surgery, OB/GYN, Anesthesiology, Diagnostic Radiology, Interventional Radiology, Orthopedic Surgery, Dermatology, Neurology, Ophthalmology, Otolaryngology (ENT), Urology, Plastic Surgery, Radiation Oncology, Neurosurgery, Pathology, and PM&R. Podiatry (DPM) — all CPME-accredited programs nationwide.

Every resident clears five checks, the last within 24 hours of joining: (1) we reject personal email domains, so signups come from a hospital, program, or .edu address; (2) the NPI number must resolve to a real individual provider in the federal NPPES registry; (3) that NPI's practice location is compared against their selected program state; (4) a government-issued photo ID, verified through Stripe Identity, whose name is compared against their NPI registry record — except for residents we verified by hand, where that comparison is skipped; (5) within 24 hours of a resident joining, a person looks them up by name against their program's published roster. We'd rather tell you exactly what those do than oversell them. Of the automated ones, the ID check is the hard stop — no ID, no listing. The rest are strong filters, not walls: an email check can only reject the personal domains it knows about, NPPES practice addresses lag months behind a real move, and a brand-new intern's NPI record often still points at their medical school. What each one does when it fails is different, and worth being precise about: an NPI that resolves to an organization rather than a person is a hard stop at signup, and so is a personal email domain — with one exception: a program that issues its residents no institutional address at all, in which case we create the account by hand after checking the resident's NPI and their program's roster ourselves, and the ID check and payout setup still run as normal. A practice-location mismatch is not — stale NPPES addresses are so common that we verify those accounts normally and flag them for a human to confirm against the roster. Cases the automatic checks can't place are routed to manual review, which is where a meaningful share of our verified residents came from. The check that actually settles it is the last one: we look every resident up by name against their program's published roster. That's a person reading a public roster, and it's the check a fake account can't survive — you would need a real NPI, a government ID that passes Stripe's document check, and a genuine appearance on the roster of the program you claim — which a person checks by hand, for every resident, within 24 hours of joining. One thing we'd rather be precise about than flatter ourselves over: that roster check happens AFTER a resident's listing goes live, not before. Residents finish signup and appear straight away — we don't hold anyone in a queue — and the check runs within 24 hours. So it is an audit rather than a gate, and a listing that fails it comes down.

Resident Insider runs in your browser and is fully optimized for mobile — there's no separate App Store or Google Play download. For an app-like experience, open myresidentinsider.com on your phone and tap "Get the App" in the menu; that opens short steps for adding it to your home screen: on an iPhone, through the Share button; on Android, through Chrome's three-dot menu.

University and hospital email systems sometimes filter automated emails, even from senders configured correctly. First, check the address you typed for a typo. Then check your spam or junk folder — that catches most cases. If it still hasn't arrived after a couple of minutes, click "Send a Login Link Instead" on the verification screen. That sends a login link as a different kind of email, which often gets through when the code doesn't. As a last resort, click the "email support" link on the same screen — the email opens pre-filled with the details we need from you, and we'll verify you by hand within a day.

If you're logged in, use "Change Password": it's at the bottom of the Student Dashboard, or under Account in the Settings tab of the Resident Dashboard. If you've forgotten it, choose "Forgot?" on the login page and we'll email a reset link to the address you log in with.

Email support@myresidentinsider.com. Once a resident is live, they can also post ideas and bug reports in The Lounge's Suggestions room; only we can read it, and our replies come back to them there.

Resident Insider was built by practicing US attendings. We've each been on every side of the Match: student, applicant, resident, now attending. We built this because we wished it existed when we were applying — the honest take on programs only happens behind closed doors, and that information shouldn't be reserved for whoever happens to know the right person.

Sign up with your school email and a password, then enter the six-digit code we send you. Pick your school and year, and you're ready to start messaging residents. We accept .edu, international academic domains from a fixed list (such as .ac.uk and .edu.au), and named medical-school domains that follow neither pattern. Right now there is exactly one named domain — Rosalind Franklin's my.rfums.org, which covers Scholl College of Podiatric Medicine — so if your school's address is rejected and you think it shouldn't be, email support@myresidentinsider.com and we'll add it. International medical graduates can sign up with any email address; the IMG question below explains how.

$50 for a Standard message, which the resident has 3 days to answer, or $75 for a Priority message, which they have 1 day to answer; choose Priority with the "Priority Response" switch as you write. If the resident declines or doesn't answer in time, you get a full refund. If a resident becomes unavailable, any pending questions are automatically refunded. Each message is one question, one answer. There are no subscriptions, no hidden fees, and no recurring charges — you only pay when you send a message. Years of your life. A fifty-dollar question.

Automatically, and in full, in four cases: the resident declines your question or flags it as inappropriate, the response window ends without an answer (3 days for Standard, 1 day for Priority), the resident leaves the platform before answering, or you delete your account while the question is still waiting. The refund goes back to your original payment method, we email you when it's issued, and it usually appears within 5–⁠10 business days, depending on your bank. An answer that meets the 250-character minimum isn't refunded; if one ignores what you asked, email support@myresidentinsider.com and we'll look into it.

Yes. The account is free, and so is every student tool — Rotation Debriefs (Externship Debriefs for DPM students), the Interview Tracker, the Rank List, the Questions to Ask guides, The Right Words and Find Your Specialty for MD/DO and IMG students, and Find Your Residency with its Externship Ratings for DPM students. For students, the only charge on the platform is sending a question to a verified resident: $50 Standard or $75 Priority, refunded in full if they don't answer within the window. No subscriptions, no tiers.

Ask anything about the program and the training experience: culture, call schedule, autonomy, case and surgical volume, how the program treats its residents, fellowship and job placement, what they'd change, red flags — the honest, lived-experience things you can't find online. The one thing to keep out is personal medical or clinical advice; this is for program insight, not patient care. Residents can decline any question they'd rather not take, and you're refunded in full if they do, so there's no risk in asking something specific. Keep your own identifying details out of the question, too — anonymity protects both sides. One practical limit: a question is 10–500 characters, with a live counter as you type — long enough for real context, short enough that a resident can answer it properly.

Start with the questions only a resident can answer honestly — whether they'd rank the program again, the worst part nobody mentions, how much autonomy residents really get, who covers when someone is out. Our Questions to Ask guide has a curated list for MD/DO and IMG applicants and a separate one for DPM externships, each with five marked to start with. Copy one, paste it into your message, and ask one question per message so the resident can answer it properly.

There's nothing improper about it. Talking to current residents to research a program is something applicants have always done — at conferences, through mutual friends, on interview day. Resident Insider just makes it anonymous, structured, and open to everyone instead of only whoever knows the right person. It has no connection to the NRMP Match or the podiatric residency match run by National Matching Services, never touches your ERAS or CASPR application, and never tells a program who you are. Schools don't typically have rules about how you research programs, but if yours has a policy on outside services, it's worth a quick check.

A few safeguards protect answer quality. Every answer must be at least 250 characters, so you won't get a one-line brush-off, and you choose who to ask partly by their displayed rating. After an answer arrives you have 7 days to rate it 1–⁠5 stars, and those ratings carry weight: a resident whose average drops too low is warned, then reviewed by a real person, and residents who stay low-rated can lose their seat. Full refunds happen only in the four cases under "When do I get a refund?" — a delivered, substantive answer isn't refundable — but if an answer is genuinely off-topic or ignores what you asked, email support@myresidentinsider.com and we'll look into it.

We email you the moment a verified resident submits their answer — no need to keep refreshing your dashboard. The email comes from support@myresidentinsider.com, so whitelist that address (or check your spam folder) if you don't see it. You'll also get an email whenever your question is refunded automatically (the four cases under "When do I get a refund?"). Refunds are issued automatically to your original payment method and typically appear within 5–⁠10 business days — the exact timing depends on your bank, not on us. After the answer arrives, you have 7 days to rate the response from your dashboard, 1–⁠5 stars. The rating row shows a clear countdown ("X days left to rate") so the deadline is visible — past 7 days the rating window closes. The email doesn't include the answer or the program; you read the answer on your dashboard. If your school inbox keeps filtering it, you can send these emails to a personal address instead: add one under "Notifications" at the bottom of your Student Dashboard.

No. Residents never see your name, email, school, or any identifying information. They only see your question and that it came from a verified student.

Yes. You can browse programs across any degree track and message any verified resident on the platform — you're never restricted to your own track. If the resident's degree differs from yours (say, you're a DPM student asking an MD/DO orthopedic resident), they may speak to their field generally rather than your specific track, and they can decline off-track questions at no cost to you.

You can watch any program that doesn't have a resident yet — just open the program and tap "Watch This Program." Up to five at a time; to add another, stop watching one from the Watching tab on your dashboard. You'll receive an email the moment a resident from that program finishes verifying and goes live. Speed matters when the email arrives — each resident can take only three pending questions at a time, so early movers get their questions in before the queue fills. Every email includes an unsubscribe link. The number of students watching a program is shown on that program's page, and the directory's "Students Waiting" filter lists the programs students are waiting on that still have no Insider — the count only, never who.

Each resident can have up to three pending questions at a time. If a resident's queue is already full, you'll see an "At capacity" notice on their profile before you start writing — no wasted typing — and if another verified resident at the same program has capacity, we'll point you straight to them with a one-click link. Otherwise queues typically clear within 1–3 days as residents answer (Priority questions clear in 1 day, Standard in 3 days). This cap keeps answer quality high — residents aren't buried under a wall of questions they can't thoughtfully get to.

Yes. Your student dashboard has a Find Your Specialty tool: answer up to 14 questions about how you want to practice — procedural mix, illness severity, weekly hours, schedule predictability, training length, research intensity, diagnostic ambiguity, team coordination, and more — and we rank 24 major MD/DO specialties against your stated preferences. Each match shows plain-English reasoning and cited data from NRMP, Medscape, ACGME, AAMC, and the specialty societies, with a note beside any figure that needs one saying exactly where it came from; a few pay figures are triangulated across two or three of the Doximity, SalaryDr, and Marit salary surveys (each row's note names which), and one is a blend of two Medscape figures. It also flags where a top match scores below 50/100 on an answer you gave. Open any match for its full profile — a typical day, training structure, match competitiveness (Step 2 means, fill rate, US MD and DO match rates, signaling weight), attending pay, lifestyle, practice characteristics, common misconceptions, and subspecialty paths. IMG students see IMG match figures first (US-citizen and non-US-citizen IMGs, from NRMP; all IMGs together for Ophthalmology and Urology), with the US figures beside them. You can compare any three side by side. It's a reasoning tool, not an answer key: it surfaces tradeoffs you might otherwise miss, and then you verify with people actually in the field. Available to MD/DO and IMG students; DPM students follow a different match (CASPR), so the tool is gated accordingly.

All 24 MD/DO specialties that account for the large majority of NRMP, SF Match, and AUA Match positions — the primary specialties most students weigh when applying directly from medical school (Ophthalmology and Urology run their own matches), from Internal Medicine and Family Medicine to Neurosurgery and Plastic Surgery. Smaller dedicated tracks — Child Neurology, Medical Genetics, Nuclear Medicine, Preventive Medicine, and Neurodevelopmental Disabilities — aren't included; they're real residencies, but they're typically chosen by students who already know that's where they're headed, not picked through cross-specialty comparison. Fellowship subspecialties (Cardiology, GI, Heme/Onc, Pulm/Crit Care, and the rest) are also outside the tool's scope — those come after residency, so they're not relevant to a Match-cycle decision. Med-Peds is included as its own profile; other combined paths like IM/Psych and IM/EM are covered through their component specialties.

Yes. Your student dashboard has a Find Your Residency tool: browse every CPME-accredited podiatric residency program in the US, organized by state. Each program shows its CPME-authoritative details (program type, authorized positions, program director, address, and phone, with a badge when a program is on probation, provisionally accredited, withdrawing, withdrawn, or closed) plus city economics for the program's location (cost of living from BEA Regional Price Parities and 1-bedroom rent from HUD Fair Market Rents, a 40th-percentile figure that current listings usually run above). Each program also shows anonymous externship ratings — how verified DPM students who report externing there scored nine areas of the experience (see "I'm a DPM student. How do the externship ratings work?"). You can save programs to a shortlist as you go. The goal is one organized place to research programs instead of digging through CPME PDFs, hospital sites, and AACPM individually. Available to DPM students; MD/DO students have a separate Find Your Specialty tool that ranks specialties against their preferences.

Externship ratings are anonymous, structured ratings of the experience that verified DPM students leave for programs they report externing at, pooled into a per-program average on Find Your Residency. After a rotation you rate nine areas of the experience — surgical volume, case diversity, operative autonomy, clinic experience, teaching, didactics, facilities, culture and morale, and work-life — and answer two yes/no questions: whether you'd rank the program, and whether you'd recommend the externship itself to a classmate. For each area you tap the score from 1 to 5 that best matches what you saw, and the descriptions show what a 5, a 3, and a 1 look like: surgical volume, for example, runs from "Minimal surgical exposure" (1) to "High volume, in the OR most days" (5). Each program shows a five-segment bar for each area, filled to the externs' plain average score and never rounded toward either end, so two externs who score it 4 and 5 fill four and a half segments; tap an area to see its three descriptions. Below the bars, each program shows the share who would rank it and the share who would recommend the externship, so you see how a program landed with students who were actually on the ground. When the two disagree, it usually means one of two things: a strong residency whose externship is thin, or a great month at a program the extern wouldn't personally choose. Both shares read as a count (3 of 4, say) until five externs have answered, and as a percentage after that. When you sort programs by "Top Rated," whether by "Overall" (the share who would rank the program) or by a single area, the order takes into account how many externs rated, so one extern never outranks 12 with a slightly lower result; each program still shows its plain averages and shares. It's anonymous: your name is never shown, and ratings appear only as pooled averages alongside the number of externs who rated. One honest caveat: until a second extern rates a program, that average and both yes/no answers necessarily reflect a single person's ratings, which is exactly why the extern count is shown next to it. A few rules keep the signal honest: only verified DPM students can rate (we verify the student, not the externship); you can rate each program once (you can update or remove your own rating any time while your account is open, but not once it has closed); and you can rate up to 10 programs at a time. Only the last two externship seasons count toward a program's average, so older ratings roll off automatically and the signal stays current — each program shows which season its ratings are from, and says so when they span both. A season runs July through June and is written as a range (2025–⁠26, for example), so a fall and a spring externship at the same program count as the same season and roll off together. You are never asked which season you were there: it is taken from the date you submit, which is one more reason to rate an externship while it is still fresh. Treat it as a first impression, not a verdict — each rating reflects one extern's experience over a roughly one-month rotation, not Resident Insider's opinion. It's a strong starting signal; for the real inside story on a specific program, ask a verified resident who actually trains there.

Yes — two tools work together. The Interview Tracker (the Interviews tab) is where you log invites, update their status, and add notes after each one; it keeps your next interview at the top, and the day after each one it asks for a quick read — whether you'd rank the program, and a gut score out of 5. Pick each program from the list when you log it, and the row tells you whether a verified resident from that program is on the platform so you can ask them before you rank, or lets you watch the program from the same row if nobody is there yet. The Rank List, on its own tab, pulls every program from your interviews and your rotation or externship debriefs into one place, lets you weight what matters and score each program (pre-filled from your debrief ratings, and ordered by your gut score until you score the factors), and builds a ranked order you can reorder by hand — flagging where your gut differs from the scores. A program you mark "No" on its interview read or debrief drops out of the list, and you can restore it. Both are free, private, and visible only to you.

Yes. Your student dashboard has Rotation Debriefs (Externship Debriefs for DPM students) — the Rotations or Externships tab — where you can capture each one while the experience is fresh: ratings across clinical exposure and procedural or surgical exposure, education, environment, and lifestyle, plus a rank decision (Must Rank, Probable, Maybe, or No) and a one-sentence gut feeling for each program. The questions adapt to your degree: DPM students get podiatry-specific fields like surgical case mix and hands-on scrub level; MD/DO students get a procedural-exposure rating plus four quick flags on culture, responsibility, safety, and specialty fit. Everything stays private to you. MD/DO students: focus on aways, sub-Is, and your home program — the places you might rank, since every debrief seeds a row in your Rank List. DPM students: log every externship; the data compounds.

Yes. Your student dashboard has The Right Words — fill-in-the-blank email templates for the high-stakes moments of applying, in the order you meet them: outreach and mentorship (shadowing, research, away rotations, and a personal-statement review), letters of recommendation, applying and interviewing (accepting, rescheduling, or declining an interview, a couples-match note, sharing a new Step score, and expressing continued interest), after the interview (thank-yous, updates, second looks, a letter of intent, replying when a program asks how you'll rank it, and withdrawing), after the Match (thanking mentors, introducing yourself to your program, and SOAP), and a dedicated set for IMG and visa applicants (observership and US clinical experience requests, home-school documents, visa-sponsorship questions, and mentorship outreach). Pick a template, fill in a few blanks, and copy it into your email. The sensitive ones carry a Match-rule note on how to stay inside the NRMP rules — the bright lines up front, the full rule a tap away — for example, telling only one program it's your top choice and never asking a program how it will rank you. They're fixed templates rather than AI-generated text, because the pre-vetted wording is what keeps them safe. Free to MD/DO and IMG students; DPM students follow a different match (CASPR), so it's gated to MD/DO and IMG.

On our public Match Statistics page at myresidentinsider.com/stats, which has a full timeline for each track — Medicine (MD/DO) shows the ERAS and NRMP dates; Podiatry (DPM) shows CASPR and CRIP. Your dashboard carries the dates that apply to you: DPM third-years see the AACPM externship cycle's next date on an Application Timeline pill that opens the full round-by-round schedule; first- and second-years see the same cycle on a Third-Year Externship Cycle pill, with the July their own cycle opens in place of a countdown; and fourth-years and graduates see the next CASPR, CRIP, or Match date. Every DPM student's pill also leads to this year's full Match Timeline (CASPR, CRIP, and the Match), below the externship schedule on the Application Timeline page. MD/DO and IMG students get a line under their dashboard header for the next interview they've logged, the day after each one a prompt for their read, and, for fourth-years and graduates, a countdown to the rank order list certification deadline from the day NRMP ranking opens. At the top of their dashboard, every MD/DO and IMG student also has a Match Timeline link that opens the full ERAS and NRMP timeline on the Match Statistics page.

Yes. On the signup page, with "MD/DO" selected, choose "International Medical Graduate" — it covers both students and residents, and you'll be asked which one you are. Students at medical schools in Canada choose it too: NRMP and ECFMG treat anyone graduating from a Canadian medical school on or after July 1, 2025 as an IMG. As a student applying to US residency, you can sign up with any email address and verify with a code, then enter your medical school as free text rather than picking from the US list. Once verified, you can message any Insider, any specialty, anywhere in the country. If you are already in a US residency, you sign up through the same option but follow the standard resident signup path instead: an institutional email (hospital, program, or .edu — personal Gmail and Yahoo addresses aren't accepted at signup), an NPI number, a government-issued ID, and a connected bank account for payouts. Connecting payouts is what makes your profile go live to students; the verification itself is the five checks described under "How do I know residents are real?"

Until the July after you finish school — the date is set from the year you enter at signup, so a first-year account runs to the July after fourth year, and a final-year or graduate account runs to the coming July (or, if you join within 2 months of July 1, to the July after). We email you 30 days before it closes, and that email carries the exact closing and deletion dates; we email you again when it closes, and once more when it is deleted. From the closing date the account is closed: you can still log in, but you can no longer ask questions, open the answers you paid for, or use the student tools — and once a further 30 days have passed the account is permanently deleted, taking your rank list, your interview notes, and your debriefs with it. Nothing is removed less than 60 days after we have written to you, and we never close an account with a question awaiting an answer or a refund, or an answer delivered in the last 7 days. If you are still in school, still applying, or taking a research year, reply to any of those emails at any point before the deletion date and we will extend it — no explanation needed. If you have matched, you are welcome on the resident side: that is a separate account, so sign up with your institutional email (.edu, hospital, or program) and verify as a resident — or, if that is the address already on this account, write to support and we will switch it over. Your past questions and answers stay on the platform with your identity removed, as they do when anyone deletes an account. Externship ratings you submitted stay too, with your identity removed, so the programs other students read about keep their ratings.

Sign up with your institutional email (.edu, hospital, or program email), enter the verification code, then provide your NPI number. The moment you finish signing up you're prompted to complete identity verification with a government-issued ID, then to connect a bank account for payouts through Stripe Connect. The ID check is run by Stripe and carries a one-time $1.50 fee that goes toward the check itself (a duplicate charge is refunded automatically). You can also start the check any time from the checklist on your dashboard. Your profile goes live to students the moment both identity verification AND payout setup are complete — we don't hold you in a queue, and requiring both keeps the platform clean of half-onboarded profiles that couldn't actually answer questions. Within 24 hours of that, a person looks you up by name against your program's published roster: a human verification layer the automated checks can't replicate, and part of what keeps the platform genuinely resident-only. If a listing doesn't hold up to that check, we take it down. Start to finish, signup takes minutes. Seats are limited to two Insiders per specialty program — if your program is full, you can join the waitlist. Personal emails (Gmail, Yahoo, and similar) are not accepted at signup — see "My program doesn't give me an institutional email. Can I still sign up?" if your program doesn't issue you an institutional address.

A government-issued photo ID, such as a driver's license or a passport, scanned on Stripe's page — the document itself never reaches Resident Insider; we receive only the name Stripe reads off it. If a scan doesn't go through, there's nothing to pay again: we email you a link to try once more, and a clearer photo or another document usually settles it. If the name on your ID doesn't match your NPI record — a maiden name, say — a person reviews it rather than a machine, and you'll hear from us within a day either way. That comparison is skipped for residents we have already verified by hand. The $1.50 isn't refunded once the check has started, even if you don't finish it, with two exceptions: a duplicate charge is refunded automatically, and if the last seat at your program is taken while you're verifying, your $1.50 comes back to you.

If your program has no Insider yet, the number of students waiting to ask a resident from it is shown on the program's page, under the program picker when you sign up, and on your dashboard checklist until you go live. The program directory's "Students Waiting" filter lists every program that still has no Insider and students waiting. Counts only, never who. The moment you're fully verified, every student watching the program is emailed that a resident from your program has joined — and each resident takes only a few questions at a time, so the first questions in are usually theirs.

Yes — email support@myresidentinsider.com and we'll set you up by hand. Some programs, especially those based in a private practice rather than a university or hospital system, don't issue their residents an address at all. The signup form can't tell that apart from someone simply preferring their personal inbox, so it turns the address away either way. Write in and we'll create the account for you. Nothing else about verification changes: you'll still complete identity verification with a government-issued ID, still connect a bank account for payouts, and a person still checks you by name against your program's published roster, within 24 hours of you joining. The email requirement is a filter, not the proof — the ID and the roster are.

Yes. If you're an international medical graduate currently in a US residency, you're eligible on exactly the same terms as any other resident — the same $25 and $38 per answer, the same anonymity, the same programs. On the signup page, with "MD/DO" selected, choose "International Medical Graduate" and then "In Residency Now." You'll enter your medical school as free text instead of picking from the US-only list; everything else is the standard resident signup path — institutional email, NPI, government-issued ID, then connecting a bank account for payouts, which is what makes your profile go live to students. Personal emails (Gmail, Yahoo, and similar) aren't accepted at signup, IMG or otherwise. If your program doesn't issue you an institutional address at all, email support@myresidentinsider.com and we'll set the account up for you.

You earn $25 for every Standard message you respond to, and $38 for Priority messages. Payouts are initiated automatically after each answer and typically arrive in your bank account in about 5 business days. That accounts for Stripe's charge-clearing period (about 2 days), the standard payout delay (about 2 days), and ACH to your bank (about 1 day). Same cadence for every answer. In some cases Stripe extends this window for new accounts under additional verification — if that happens with yours, it's their standard process, not something on our end. One thing worth knowing up front: your listing depends on payouts staying connected. If Stripe pauses them — it sometimes asks for an updated ID or proof of address — you can't answer questions while that's unresolved, including any already waiting in your queue, and your profile stops appearing to students. We email you as soon as it happens. Your program seat isn't taken away automatically in that situation: a person reviews the account, not a timer. One rare case runs the other way: if a student's payment for an answer is reversed after you have already been paid — usually a chargeback they file with their bank, occasionally a refund we issue — Stripe pulls that payout back out of your balance. We email you the amount when it happens, and the question stays in your history marked as reversed, so it is never something you find by noticing a smaller number.

The Lounge is a private, off-the-record space inside Resident Insider where verified residents talk to each other peer-to-peer. There's a General room for whatever's on your mind, plus Academics, Careers, Finance, Wellness, and Vent rooms. There's also an Interesting Cases room — diagnostic puzzles, unusual presentations, and cases worth learning from, with patient-privacy rules at the top of the room and again above the message box. And a Guides room — a curated library of plain-English career guides covering the major decisions and documents of residency and the move to attending: your residency contract, money during and after residency, student loans, taxes, licensing and credentialing, malpractice coverage, and your first job offer, plus two for your degree: moonlighting and fellowship for MD/DO; case logs and board certification, and billing and coding for DPM. Every claim is checked against the primary source and cited, and the guides are released one at a time as each is finished. There's also a Suggestions room only we can read — feature ideas and bugs go straight to us, and our replies come back to you in the same room. An Updates room carries our product news and policy changes; it's read-only. Now and then we post a poll in the General room; votes are anonymous and results appear only as totals. MD/DO and DPM each have their own Lounge with the same room set and House Rules. The two are segregated at the data layer: verified MD/DO residents see only MD/DO members, verified DPM residents see only DPM members, never the other. Every resident in the room goes through the same five-step verification you did (our own posts come from accounts clearly named "Resident Insider") — an institutional email (.edu, hospital, or program email), an NPI, a practice-location check, a government ID, and a human check against their program's published roster. The roster check is the one a person does — within 24 hours of a resident joining, not before they appear. Where the location check can't confirm a match — NPPES addresses lag real moves — a person reviews the account by hand instead. So there are no bots, no throwaway accounts, and no students. That bar is also why moderation stays light: when every member has met it, The Lounge largely governs itself, and the House Rules (anonymity, patient privacy, mutual respect) are a quiet backstop, not a hovering presence. The Lounge unlocks automatically from your dashboard once you're live to students, and medical students and visitors can never access it. Every room except Suggestions is searchable, and links in posts are clickable.

Yes. Every member is assigned an automatic pseudonym: [Specialty (or degree, for DPM)] Insider R[PGY year]-[sequence]. For example, "IM Insider R2-001" is the first internal medicine resident to enter The Lounge, currently a PGY-2; the year in the handle tracks your current PGY year and advances each July. The components come from your verified profile (specialty and year), and the sequence number is permanent and per-specialty (per-degree for DPM). You can't choose your handle and you can't change it — that's by design. A self-chosen handle ("MGHIM2027") could leak identity in a handful of characters; an auto-generated one can't. Your real name, email, and program details are never shown to other Lounge members.

After your ID check, click "Set Up Payouts" on the setup checklist at the top of your Resident Dashboard. On Stripe's page, choose "Individual" as your business type, then enter your personal details and bank account info. Setup takes a few minutes. It's powered by Stripe, so your financial info is never shared with Resident Insider. Once connected, payouts are initiated automatically after each answer. Funds arrive in your bank about 5 business days after each answer — Stripe's charge clearing, then its payout delay, then ACH to your bank.

You get an immediate email the moment a student sends you a question, so you never have to check the dashboard proactively. If you still haven't answered when 24 hours of runway are left on the Standard (3-day) tier, or 12 hours on the Priority (1-day) tier, we send one reminder email with the dollar amount waiting — never more than one nudge per question. You'll also receive: a rating email each time a student rates one of your answers (with their 1–⁠5 score), a payout confirmation the moment each payout is sent, a notice on the rare occasion a payout has to be reversed (see "How much do I earn per message?" above), a heads-up 30 days before your listing closes on the completion date shown on your profile, and account alerts if Stripe ever pauses payouts or your ratings need attention. If you use The Lounge, you also get one quiet email when someone replies to you — no message content, never more than one per 15 minutes, and off any time in Settings. The new-question email never includes the question itself; you read it on your dashboard. Every account email comes from support@myresidentinsider.com. No third-party sharing of your email. Beyond account emails, we send the optional Resident Insider Weekly newsletter (opt-in only, with an unsubscribe link in every issue) and, very rarely, a note to verified residents and students about the platform itself, which you can opt out of. If your institutional inbox isn't the one you check daily, you can route these to a personal email instead, under "Notifications" in the Settings tab of your dashboard. Logging in stays tied to the email you log in with — login codes and password resets always go there — while everything else, including identity-verification emails, follows this setting. One deliberate exception: security alerts about your payout settings always go to the email you log in with, so a change to your bank details can never be hidden from you.

Not from us. We never tell programs, hospitals, or students who you are, and your name is never stored on your profile or shown to anyone else here. Without an account, anyone can see which programs and specialties have a verified Insider in the directory. The homepage also shows a map of the cities Insiders are in and a line when one joins (the specialty and how long ago, and, for podiatry, the state). None of it says who. Once a student creates a free account and logs in, they can open your profile: your program and specialty, whether the position is a preliminary year, your bio, rating, response rate, and number of answers, plus your PGY year only if you choose to show it. Other residents can't open your profile at all. Each program has at most two Insiders, so at a small program that is a narrow circle, and what you write can still point to you. Leave out names, dates, and details only you would know.

We cap each residency program at two verified Insiders to keep the platform exclusive. Fewer Insiders per program means more messages directed to you and higher earnings. Important: the cap is per specialty program, not per hospital — at Johns Hopkins, for example, the Internal Medicine residency has its own two-seat cap, the Psychiatry residency has a separate two-seat cap, Emergency Medicine has its own, and so on. A large institution with 15+ specialties can easily support 15+ Insiders total, just distributed across programs. If your specific program is full, you can join the waitlist; we email the next person on the waitlist when a seat opens; if that's you, the seat is held for 2 days — log in with the same email address you waitlisted with and finish verifying within that window, or we move on to the next person. Miss it and you can rejoin the waitlist at any time. Your seat stays yours through your training. It opens to the waitlist when your listing reaches the completion date on your profile. The seat also opens if someone verifies their ID but never finishes connecting payouts within 14 days — without payouts students can't reach them and they can't be paid, so the seat goes to someone who can use it. If that happens to you, finish connecting payouts and email us: we'll restore your seat if one is still open; if your program has filled up in the meantime, we'll work out next steps with you directly. Once you've been live, none of this applies to you — if Stripe pauses your payouts later, a person reviews it rather than a timer, and your seat stays yours while it's sorted out.

Search the program directory first — most ACGME and CPME programs are already there, and searching the program name on its own is the surest way to find it. If it genuinely isn't listed, use the "Request a Program" panel at the bottom of that page. Tell us the program's name, city, and state, its specialty if it's an MD/DO program, and your email if you'd like to hear when it's live. For an MD/DO program, specialty matters: a listing is a program plus its specialty, so a hospital running several residencies has a separate listing for each, with its own two Insider seats. A request that names only the hospital can't be acted on. We'll add it and email you when it's live. If you're a resident, this is the step that unblocks you — signup asks you to choose your program, so you can't finish until yours is listed.

Sign up under Interventional Radiology — that's the residency you matched into, and it's a separate program from the Diagnostic Radiology residency at the same institution. It becomes your primary specialty and leads your profile. Once you're live to students, email support@myresidentinsider.com and we'll add your institution's Diagnostic Radiology listing beneath it, so students searching either specialty can find you. That applies whether you're an integrated resident spending your early years in diagnostic or an independent-pathway resident who completed a Diagnostic Radiology residency at that same institution. One account, one verification, one set of earnings. Because each listing occupies one of the two seats at that program, we'll tell you if Diagnostic Radiology is already full at your institution.

Your account is active for the rest of your residency, based on the PGY year you enter at signup (and, for MD/DO residents, the expected completion date you confirm there) — a PGY-1 internal medicine account runs through PGY-3, a PGY-2 general surgery account through PGY-5, and so on. Each July 1, the PGY year on every account that has gone live advances automatically, and no action is needed on your part; if you began signing up before July 1 and went live after it, check the year on your profile and email support if it needs updating. If you're doing a preliminary or intern year before a different program, tick the box at signup: your listing says so, and your account runs to the end of that year rather than the length of the program you're rotating through. If your preliminary year hasn't begun yet, create your account on or after the July 1 it starts: a prelim account runs to the coming July 1, so one opened earlier would close on the first day of your year. (Transitional Year is its own one-year specialty — just pick it as your program; there's no box to tick.) Either way, email support when you know where you're headed next and we'll move your listing to that program if there's a seat open there. We email you a confirmation each July so you can flag any non-standard track (a research year, a leave, repeating a year, or a transfer) by replying to it. When your listing reaches the completion date on your profile, your account expires naturally and the seat opens for the next cohort.

Right now, Resident Insider is residents only — fellowship is not currently supported. Your account stays active through the span of your residency, then closes on the July 1 that ends your final training year — even if you're staying on at the same institution for fellowship. If you're in a preliminary or transitional year, your listing closes at the end of that year instead; email support when you know where you've matched and we'll move your listing to the new program if there's a seat open there. If you're currently in your final year of residency, you're still eligible to join now and earn for the rest of your training year — applicants ask a lot of useful questions of graduating residents about the program experience, fellowship application advice, and rotation realities.

You can edit your bio and choose whether your PGY year shows in the Settings tab on your dashboard. To change your program, specialty, school, or year, email support@myresidentinsider.com and we'll update it for you; for security and platform integrity, those changes are made by hand.

Resident Insider is not clinical work — no patient care is involved. You're simply sharing your personal experience anonymously. However, some residency programs have policies regarding outside employment or paid activities. It is your responsibility to review and comply with your program's moonlighting and outside employment policies before participating.

You can decline any question. There's no obligation to respond — the student is refunded in full right away instead of waiting out the window, and your star rating is unaffected (ratings come only from answered questions). Declined questions do lower the response rate shown on your profile, the same way expired ones do. If a question is inappropriate or harassing, flag it instead of declining — flagged questions are excluded from that rate, and our team reviews every flag.

Standard messages must be answered within 3 days; Priority messages within 1 day. If you don't respond in time, the student receives a full refund. Answers must be at least 250 characters so students receive a thorough, meaningful response. You can have up to three pending messages at a time.

After you answer a question, the student has 7 days to rate your response 1–⁠5 stars. After 7 days the rating window closes — past that point your reputation on that answer is final. The student dashboard shows a clear countdown ("X days left to rate") so the deadline is visible. Your average rating sits on your listing where students choosing who to ask can see it, and you'll get an email each time you receive a new rating. If your average falls to 4.0 or below after 8+ ratings, you'll receive a warning email — a soft heads-up so you can self-correct, not a flag. If it drops to 3.5 or below, your account is flagged for admin review — your profile stays visible to students while a human admin, never a script, reviews your recent activity and reaches out if anything needs to change; you can reply to that email to share context. Once an admin has reviewed and cleared your account, it is flagged again only after 8 more ratings. We don't auto-deactivate based on ratings alone, since 8 coordinated low ratings can be griefing rather than real feedback. Quality answers pay off.

A National Provider Identifier (NPI) is a unique 10-digit number that healthcare providers in the US apply for. We use it to confirm you exist in the federal NPPES registry as an individual provider, and — unless we have already verified you by hand — to cross-check the name on your government ID against that record. That cross-check allows for the usual differences — accents, hyphens, extra names on your ID that the registry left out, two surnames in a different order — and whatever it can't match on its own goes to a person, who emails you within a day: a genuinely different name, a less common name layout, or a registry lookup that fails. It is not a license check: the registry stores a license number the provider reports for themselves and that CMS never confirms with any state board, and we deliberately accept the leftover student taxonomy that many residents still carry. You can find yours at npiregistry.cms.hhs.gov.

Most quirks are handled automatically — no action needed on your end. If your NPPES practice address doesn't match your program's state (for example, you finished intern year in one state and moved to residency in another, but your NPPES practice address still shows the old state), the system verifies you normally — a person checks every profile against the program's published roster within 24 hours of joining, so a stale address never holds you up, unless a verification request of yours was turned down before, in which case a person reviews it first. If your NPPES record has no practice address on file (only a mailing address), your account is auto-routed to our review team: you'll see a "Manual verification queued" message at signup and get an email within a day either way. You can speed that case up by adding a practice address at nppes.cms.hhs.gov. One more case: if your NPI was issued earlier than our automatic check expects for a current resident (an earlier career, a gap year, a non-traditional path), your account is auto-routed to review the same way — you'll see the "Manual verification queued" message and get an email within a day either way. A fellowship or subspecialty taxonomy code on your NPI doesn't hold you up: the code is accepted, and a person takes a look after you verify. (Fellows aren't eligible to join, though; see "Are fellows eligible to join?") And a quick note on taxonomy: a leftover "student" code on your NPI — very common right after Match, since programs can take weeks to update it and you have no control over it — does not hold you up at all. The system accepts it and verifies you normally. Still stuck? Email support@myresidentinsider.com — we'll help directly.

Residents are independent contractors. Stripe collects your tax information securely during payout setup. If what you're paid for answers through Resident Insider in a calendar year crosses the federal reporting threshold or your state's (in some states it is as low as $600), we report those payments on Form 1099-K, filed through Stripe, and Stripe sends you a copy early the following year. Reporting your earnings on your own return is up to you, and thresholds and forms change from year to year, so consult a tax professional with any questions.

The Contract Decoder reads your first attending employment contract and explains it in plain English, clause by clause. It's for MD/DO and DPM residents who are live to students (verified, with payouts set up), and you'll find it on your dashboard and in The Lounge. Upload your contract (a text-based PDF or a Word .docx file, up to 4 MB) and it lays out what each section means, what your specific terms actually say, and how they compare to what's common in physician employment contracts — flagging the clauses most worth a closer look, putting real dollar figures on what's at stake, and giving you the concrete questions to ask before you sign. You get the breakdown on-screen and as a downloadable PDF you can keep or hand to an attorney. It's built for a high-stakes moment that medical training never covers. The Contract Decoder is an educational tool, not legal advice — for advice on your situation, have a licensed attorney in your state review your contract.

Your first decode is free for every MD/DO or DPM resident who's live to students. After that, each decode is a flat $50 — there's no subscription, and a paid decode is identical to the free one. The $50 is charged at checkout; if a decode fails or the file isn't a physician contract, your credit goes back automatically so you can try again — and on the rare occasion that return doesn't go through, we're alerted and we'll put it right. Decode credits never expire, and purchases are final.

Yes. Your resident dashboard has a Find Your Fellowship tool: every podiatric fellowship we can verify, in one directory, each labeled with its current standing — ACFAS Recognized or Research, ACFAS Conditional (including Probationary), CPME-accredited (including Provisional, Probation, or Withdrawing), or "AENS Nerve" for the nerve-surgery fellowships the AENS recognizes — and where a program holds none of those right now, it carries a plain "No Current Accreditation" label instead, so you can see a program's standing (or the absence of one) before you apply. You can also filter by focus, see the structure and funding behind each program, and save a personal shortlist. The page also carries a short note on how applying works — there is no match, you apply to each program directly, and ACFAS's own timeline has you applying in the spring and summer of PGY-2. It opens on your dashboard once you're live to students (verified, with payouts set up).

Yes. Your resident dashboard has The Attending Leap — a toolkit for landing and starting your first attending job. It pairs two things. First, fill-in-the-blank email templates for the moments that matter, including applying to a posted position, reaching out to groups and recruiters, requesting references, scheduling, following up on, and declining interviews, acknowledging and responding to offers, checking in with your credentialing coordinator, moving a start date when credentialing slips, closing out with your program and colleagues when you finish, and a dedicated set for visa holders. Second, a residency-to-attending transition checklist you can tick off as you go, phased from a year out to your first weeks as an attending, covering state licensing, your DEA registration, hospital credentialing and the separate payer-enrollment track, malpractice and tail coverage, and the financial and onboarding steps training never covers — and the items that need an email handoff to those templates. The templates stay out of salary and contract negotiation — that's what the Contract Decoder is for — and the checklist points you to the right professionals (a licensed attorney, a tax or financial advisor, your GME office) rather than giving advice. It opens on your dashboard once you're live to students (verified, with payouts set up); MD/DO residents only.

Public on your profile (visible to logged-in students): your residency program, specialty, whether the position is a preliminary or intern year, your bio if you write one, your overall rating, your response rate, and your number of answers. Without an account, anyone can see that your program has a verified Insider. The homepage also shows a map of the cities Insiders are in and a line when one joins (the specialty and how long ago, and, for podiatry, the state). None of it says who. Private (never shown to anyone else on the platform): your NPI number, medical school, graduation year, and email address. Your legal name is never stored on your profile and is never shown to students — Stripe reads it off your ID during verification, and we compare it against your public NPI registry record in that moment — unless we have already verified you by hand, in which case that comparison is skipped. The exceptions are all internal, and none is ever visible to anyone else on the platform. If your account goes to manual review, the name on your public NPI registry record is in the alert that asks a person to review you, and it is kept with that review request so they can check it against your program's roster; the stored copy is deleted when your account is. If an automated check flags something during verification, the internal alert a person reads to look you up carries your registry name for a multi-state registry record, the name on your ID for a possible fraud signal, and both for a mismatch between your ID and your registry name, so the two can be compared. When you go live, your public NPI registry name appears in the internal notification we use for the roster check. Finally, if your verification is ever reset after you have gone live and you pass the ID check again, the name on your ID can be in the alert that asks a person to redo the roster check. Apart from that stored copy, these names are never saved to your profile or our database; the alert emails that carry them stay in our support inbox until you ask us to delete them, and Resend, the service that sends our email, keeps its own copy for a limited time. Your PGY year is hidden by default and can be toggled on in your dashboard settings — see "How is resident anonymity protected at smaller programs?" for details. About the bio: a short bio can be helpful for some students when deciding between two residents at the same program. Just keep it anonymous — don't include anything that could identify you (dates, your hometown, specific research, and similar details). Stripe handles your government ID and bank account details directly during signup; Resident Insider never sees them.

Your PGY year is hidden by default on your public profile to protect your anonymity. You control that setting — show or hide it at any time from the Settings tab on your dashboard. One place it always appears, and we'd rather say so plainly: your Lounge handle is built from your specialty (or degree, for DPM) and PGY year, so it reads like "Derm Insider R2-001" whatever this setting says. The Lounge is verified residents only — students and visitors can never see it — which is why we leave the year in: among peers it is context, not exposure. Your name, email, and personal information are never shown, regardless of this setting or where you post.

Not their identities. Residents can see an aggregate count of how many Insiders are at their own program (for example, "You're 2 of 2 Insiders at this program" and "Program at capacity — your seat is secure."), so they know whether their seat is secure. But residents never see other residents' names, emails, or profiles. Inside The Lounge they do see each other's specialty and PGY year, because the handle is built from them (for DPM residents the first half is just the degree), plus a coarse indicator of whether a member has been active in the past week and a count of how many members opened each room in the last 30 days (shown once at least 10 have) — both peer-to-peer only, never visible to students or the public. Students can't see any resident identity under any circumstances. This protects resident anonymity at every level while still giving residents honest visibility into their seat at their own program.

You can browse every program by name, city, state, and specialty without an account. The public directory also shows which programs have a verified Insider — the gold badge on each institution, the gold specialty marking, and the "Insiders Only" filter are visible to anyone, logged in or not, and so is the "Students Waiting" filter, which lists the programs students are waiting on. A marker says a program has an Insider, never who; a count says how many students are waiting, never who. On a computer, the directory also opens on a US map that counts the Insiders in each state: a number per state, never who. The homepage does show a national map of the cities Insiders are in, public counters of how many Insiders each degree has, and a line each time an Insider joins, such as "An Anesthesiology resident joined 19 hours ago": the specialty and how long ago (and, for podiatry, the state), never the program or the person. That is deliberate — it is how we show the network is real. The map is city-level and never names a program or a person. It is not a hiding place, though: where a city has only one program in a degree, a dot there does point at that program, and our public totals are small enough right now that they can imply how many people a dot stands for. We would rather say that plainly than imply the map reveals nothing. The same goes for the directory's program markers: at a program with only a handful of residents, "this program has an Insider" is a narrower circle than a city dot, and we say so rather than pretend otherwise. Individual program and resident pages exist at stable links, and we would rather describe them plainly. Opened without an account, they show a login prompt rather than the full profile (that is the rendered page — and the data behind it carries no name or contact information in any case); when you're logged in as a student, the page shows the program and specialty, whether the position is a preliminary year, the resident's bio, their rating, response rate, and number of answers, and their PGY year only if they have chosen to display it. They are excluded from search engines. What such a page never shows, logged in or not, is the resident's name, email address, NPI number, medical school, graduation year, or whether they are an international medical graduate. Profiles have no name field, and students never see one. Our database never holds the name read off a resident's ID, and it holds the name on their public NPI registry record only if their account goes to manual review: it is kept with that review request so a person can check it against their program's roster, and it is deleted when the account is. "What information about me is public vs private?" lists the internal alert emails that carry either name. Sending a message always requires a verified student account.

All data is transmitted securely over HTTPS and stored with row-level security. Your personal information is never shown to other students or residents, and we use your verification data only to verify you: at signup, and in the roster check a person does after you go live.

All transactional emails — account verification, new question alerts, answer notifications, rating updates, payout confirmations, refunds, and account reminders — come from support@myresidentinsider.com. If you use Gmail, Outlook, or a .edu inbox, adding this address to your contacts (or marking the first email as "Not spam") prevents future notifications from landing in spam. We don't sell your email address or give it to anyone for their own use. Besides account emails, we send the Resident Insider Weekly newsletter (opt-in only, with an unsubscribe link in every issue) and, very rarely, a note to verified residents and students about the platform, which you can opt out of.

Yes, students and residents both. Add a personal address under "Notifications," at the bottom of the Student Dashboard or in the Settings tab of the Resident Dashboard, then confirm it from the link we email there. After that, account emails go to it: answer and refund notices for students, and question alerts, payouts, ratings, and reminders for residents. Login codes and password resets always go to the address you log in with, and so do alerts about a resident's payout settings. The newsletter keeps whatever address you subscribed with.

Yes. Students can delete their account with "Delete Account" at the bottom of the Student Dashboard while the account is open; once it has closed, write to support@myresidentinsider.com and we'll delete it. Residents can delete their account from the Settings tab of the Resident Dashboard. Your profile, email, and name are permanently removed — your identity is fully erased from the platform. Copies can remain in our support inbox: in its internal alert emails and in anything you have written to us. We'll delete those too if you ask; Resend, the service that sends our email, keeps its own copy for a limited time. Past Q&As (question text, answer text, and any ratings) stay on the platform with your identity severed. Each one keeps its payment reference (Stripe's identifier for the charge) so a refund or a dispute can still be handled. This keeps things fair to the other party: residents don't lose the ratings they earned when a student later leaves, and students keep the answer histories they paid for when a resident later leaves. DPM students: the externship ratings you submitted also stay, with your identity removed, so the programs other students read about keep their ratings — you can withdraw a rating from Find Your Residency at any time while your account is open, but not afterward. This action cannot be undone. Two things can hold a deletion, and neither refuses it. First, for anyone: if a question payment is still being processed on your account, we hold the deletion until it lands, so the payment isn't lost. That normally takes a few minutes; then delete again, and if it's still held, email support@myresidentinsider.com and we'll clear it for you. Second, for residents: if you have earnings we haven't sent yet, the deletion is held rather than completed — closing the account they're heading to would make that money unrecoverable. You'll see the amount and what's happening. Payouts still in transit clear on their own within a few business days, and then you can finish the deletion; if one is genuinely stuck, email support@myresidentinsider.com and we'll settle it with you directly. Very rarely, if several question payments on the account are in an unconfirmed state at once, we hold the deletion and notify our team rather than risk losing one — that hold is cleared by a person, not by retrying, and the screen tells you so. Residents: any unused Contract Decoder credit is destroyed when the account is deleted, and purchases are final — the confirmation screen shows your balance before you confirm, so use it first if you want to.

Your contract is never stored. Our server reads it in memory only to extract the text, runs the analysis, then discards the file and its text — nothing is written to disk or any storage. The extracted text is sent to Anthropic to produce the analysis; it's never used to train their models, and they hold it only for a limited period (up to 30 days) for abuse monitoring. What we keep is the plain-English breakdown, encrypted and locked to your account, plus a little bookkeeping: a one-way fingerprint of the extracted text so re-uploading the same file doesn't charge you twice, the date, the model used, your degree, whether the decode was free or paid, its status, and a short error note if it failed. When a paid decode completes, an internal alert reaches our support inbox with your email, your degree, the specialty the contract names, and the decode's internal reference number — never the contract or its terms — and the purchase record (Stripe's identifiers and the amount) is kept after you delete your account so refunds and disputes can be handled. No one else can read your breakdown — it's encrypted, and row-level security in our database ties it to your account alone. You can delete any analysis instantly, every analysis auto-deletes 30 days after you run it, and deleting your account removes them all. (The Decoder is an educational tool, not legal advice — for advice on your situation, have a licensed attorney in your state review your contract.)