During the Christmas break in 2024, we committed to building a simple international GPA calculator in JavaScript. On January 13, 2025, we registered internationalgpa.com. Five days later—January 18, 2025—the web app went live.

🎉🎉🎉 Today marks exactly one year.🎊🎈🍾

From One Table to a Comprehensive Platform We started small: a clean, intuitive UI and a beginner backend with a single table for grading standard information. That was it. Twelve months later, iGPA has grown into a comprehensive international enrollment management (IEM) platform—secure, fast, and built to support the real workflows of international admissions professionals.

Here's what we've built, grouped by what matters most:

🔐 Infrastructure & Reliability

• Hardened security throughout the platform
• Built reliable failover systems
  • Survived AWS's massive hours-long outage on October 2, 2025—scary, but it taught us resilience and the value of transparency during crisis
  • That lesson helped us navigate Cloudflare's widespread outage on November 18, 2025 with more confidence
• Refined privacy policies and data processing agreements

🌐 Tools for Territory Management

• Global Education System Library—helping users understand their territories better
• Curated Recruitment Events page—so you can manage your territory in one place
• Chrome Extension—work seamlessly on the same screen (especially helpful if you're a Slate user; you know what I mean)

☺️ User Experience

• Continuously refined UI/UX based on user feedback
• Prioritized speed and clarity in every interaction
• User engagement system

Two New Features to Celebrate Year One

Yesterday, we added two features to mark this milestone 🥳 🎂:

1. Priority Support Button Now in the navigation bar. We've enhanced our service capacity to meet our commitment to providing premium support. When you need help, it's one click away.
2. Global Visa Wait Time Tracker Official visa appointment data isn't always presented in a user-friendly format. Our tracker pulls from official source to give IEM professionals clear visibility into F/M/J visa appointment availability across the globe—information that directly impacts yield. During busy seasons, clarity like this matters.

Stay Humble. Stay Beta.

We're incredibly grateful—for the users who trusted an unknown tool, for the feedback that shaped what iGPA has become, for the crises that taught us resilience.

A year in, we've learned a lot—not just about what works, but about how much further we want to go. That's why we're choosing to stay in beta. Being in beta doesn't mean half-baked or incomplete. It means maintaining the courage to break things, question assumptions, and iterate toward genuinely better solutions.

We'll keep building. We'll keep learning. And we'll stay beta.

🥂 Here's to year two. 🍾

👉 Explore what we've built: https://www.internationalgpa.com/features