What Earnest actually said
Earnest published a notice titled "Going Merry is shutting down. Here's what you need to know." In it, the company said Going Merry would officially shut down at the end of March, told students to complete and submit anything in progress by March 5, 2026, and said accounts could be accessed until March 5 with the site going dark on March 6.
On data, the notice said your information would be securely handled by Earnest and would not be sold or shared with any third party. It said scholarship sponsors keep access to applications that were already submitted, and that tax statements for anyone who won money are issued by Navient, Earnest's parent company.
We checked independently, and the platform really is gone. As of July 2026, goingmerry.com does not resolve, and the Internet Archive has no successful capture of the site after March 6, 2026.
What we are not going to tell you
Why it closed. Earnest never disclosed a reason, and we are not going to invent one. If you come across a page confidently explaining that it shut down because of costs, or low usage, or some strategic pivot, that page is guessing. There was no public explanation.
A few things worth correcting while we are here. Earnest itself did not shut down, it is still operating. Your data was not announced as deleted. And no scholarships were cancelled. Only the platform closed.
A little history, since it explains the gap
Going Merry launched in June 2017 and was acquired by Earnest in September 2021. At the time of that acquisition, Earnest said students at more than half of US high schools used it, along with one in five high school counselors, and that it had helped students secure nearly $100 million in additional financial aid.
It was still growing recently. In August 2025, seven months before the shutdown, Going Merry by Earnest announced a partnership with ACT, and that release said 360,000 students had used the platform in 2024 to secure $8.8 million in scholarships. Then it closed. That is genuinely a real hole in the free tools students had.
What to do now
You need to replace two separate things, and most pages will not tell you that. The first is discovery, somewhere to find scholarships. The second is deciding, working out which of the ones you found are actually worth your hours.
For discovery, you will need another search tool, and there are several free ones still running. Also do not skip the unglamorous sources: your high school counselor or college financial aid office, local community foundations, credit unions, your parents' employers or unions, and local civic groups. Those local awards have far smaller applicant pools than anything you find in a national database.
For deciding, that is the part almost nothing covers, and it is what we built. GoBursar has no scholarship database, so we are not a drop in Going Merry replacement and we are not going to pretend to be. What we do is take one scholarship you already found and tell you what that committee actually rewards, with a source link on every claim, plus an honest verdict on whether you should spend the week on it.