Settl AbroadJoin the waitlistJoin

Move to Germany 100× cheaper
€0 — for free.

Consultants charge international students €3,000+ for the move. Settl Abroad does the same work for €0 (for free). Visa, housing, paperwork, first month. Private, secure, on your phone.

End-to-end encryptedGDPR compliantNo card, ever
University of Europe campus, Berlin
UE · Berlin
TU München student cohort
TU · München
Lecture hall, Heidelberg
Uni · Heidelberg
By the numbers

Here's how your consultants scam you.

We will not give you a breakdown of what it costs to move to Germany. That's something every student must discover inside the app, with verified numbers for your city and your university. What we will show you is what consultancies charge for work you can do yourself in a weekend.

The consultant invoice
€3,000.
Average across 23 quotes we collected in 2025 from study-abroad agencies worldwide.
Paid up front, non-refundable, even if your visa is rejected.
Settl Abroad
€0free · for life
Free, forever. No bundles. No commission from universities. Your data stays yours.
Free for life. Join the waitlist before launch.

What's actually on the invoice

University application & shortlistingDone by you in 4 evenings on uni-assist
€450they charged
Visa slot bookingVFS portal · refreshes itself for free
€350they charged
Document checklist & prepAvailable on the consulate website
€500they charged
Statement of Purpose reviewSame template, sent to every student
€250they charged
Blocked account 'assistance'You log into Expatrio / Fintiba yourself
€200they charged
Visa interview prepThere is no visa interview for Germany
€300they charged
Housing 'support'Forwards you a list of websites you already know
€650they charged
Pre-departure briefingA 40-minute Zoom call
€300they charged
400,000+.

International students are in Germany. The average consultant fee per student was €3,000.

That's a €1.2 billion scam built on work you can do free of cost.

Sources: 23 written quotes from licensed international study-abroad consultancies · DAAD international admissions data 2024–25 · German Federal Foreign Office
For free

All of this for €0 (for free).

Listed worst problem first. Every line below is something a consultant quoted us over €3,000 for. Now it's free, forever.

  1. 01
    Visa & docs
    Document checklist tuned to your university, course and consulate. Visa rules, waivers, apostille and translations, all flagged before you submit.
  2. 02
    Visa slot
    Visa appointment monitoring with alerts the moment a slot opens at your VFS centre. We will not book on your behalf. We tell you the second it's there.
  3. 03
    Programme verify
    Independent check that your course is full-time, accredited, and visa-eligible. The failure mode that just deported 500 students.
  4. 04
    Vault
    Encrypted storage for every document. Search, share, revoke. No one reads what's in there. Not even us.
  5. 05
    Housing
    Listings filtered against a live scam database. WG photos cross-checked. Service-fee caps. Cancellation terms made human.
  6. 06
    Banking
    Blocked-account comparison. Step-by-step Sparkasse/Commerz setup. Realistic timelines so you don't book a job interview the week your card is still in the post.
  7. 07
    First month
    Day-by-day plan: Anmeldung, health insurance activation, SIM, Deutschlandticket. With the addresses, hours and forms.
  8. 08
    Community
    A private community of students making the same move. Ask anything, share what worked, and find your people before you land.
  9. 09
    24/7 advisor
    An AI trained on the German student journey. Answers in seconds, sources every claim, escalates to a human when it's not sure.
How we solve it

Six problems. Six methods.

01 · Problem · Conflicting advice

One source of truth, not ten

YouTube, your agent and WhatsApp groups all contradict each other. We replace them with one source, verified weekly against the consulate, VFS and your university — every answer timestamped, sourced and saved so it's accountable when it matters.

02 · Problem · Visa rejections from paperwork

Documents checked & filled before you submit

Missing waivers, apostille errors, the wrong document set. We catch them — and help fill them — before you mail anything, using a checklist built from real rejections.

03 · Problem · Anmeldung, bank, SIM, transit

The first month, week by week

We sequence your first 30 days so each step unblocks the next — with the office address, opening hours and exact form you'll need on the day.

04 · Problem · Privacy & data

Your documents, your vault, your call

Passport, offer letter, financial proofs — encrypted at rest, end-to-end on upload. Only you decide what's shared. Delete anything in one tap. GDPR compliant.

05 · Problem · Nobody to ask, at 2am

Students who already moved

A 15-minute call with a student already at your university — same course, same intake — matched the week you ask.

06 · Problem · Living abroad is expensive

Student life, made the cheapest

Coupons, student benefits and partner programs that cut the cost of phones, transit, software and daily life — so studying abroad costs as little as it possibly can.

You dictate, we build

We listen to your problems every week.

Every week we're on the ground with students across Germany — campuses, consulate queues, first apartments, move-in day. Real moments from the move, not marketing.

Field notes · the move, in pictures
TU Berlin · main building
University of Potsdam · lecture
UE Potsdam · campus atrium
November 2025 · Berlin

500 international students are being
deported because of their consultants.

They paid their consultants €3,000+. They paid their tuition. They moved their lives. Their visas were approved. Then mid-year, their programmes were flagged as ineligible.

Their consultants got them in. No one was there when it fell apart. No one verified the programme. No one read the fine print. No one was accountable.

That's the gap Settl Abroad is built to close. Not after the crisis, but before it. We verify every programme, every visa term, every step, before you sign a single document.

We cannot undo what happened to those 500 students.
We can help the next 500 not be in their position.

500
Students · facing deportation
€3,000
Average consultant fee · paid up front
0
People standing beside them now
The founders

Two students. One promise.

Dakshin, co-founder
Co-founder

Dakshin

Bachelor's · Digital Product ManagementUniversity of Europe · BerlinTop 10 Private B-Schools, Europe

Paid a consultant €400 just to book a visa slot. Never got the slot. Never got the visa for six months. Missed the entire first semester.

If they had done one search on the VFS portal, I wouldn't have lost a semester.

LJ Shaik, co-founder
Co-founder

LJ Shaik

Master's · Innovation ManagementUniversity of Europe · BerlinTop 10 Private B-Schools, Europe

Got scammed €700 in the name of housing before he ever landed. Was homeless for his first week in Germany, sleeping on a friend's couch with a suitcase he hadn't unpacked yet.

The system didn't just fail me. It cost me. So we rebuilt it.

Questions

The ones we'd ask too.

On average it costs students €3,200+ to recover. Counsellor fees, blocked-account interest, rent and deposit losses, a second APS, a year of lost time. We know because that's what one of our interview subjects just paid. Our job is to catch the rejection trigger before you submit, not after.
Documents are end-to-end encrypted on your device before they leave it. Stored encrypted at rest in EU data centres. Only you hold the decryption key. Not Settl Abroad, not our investors, not any law-enforcement request we haven't been served. GDPR compliant, audited annually. Delete anything in one tap.
No. And most of our highest-leverage moments come mid-process: catching a missing waiver, spotting a wrong document set, finding a visa slot the agent missed. If you've already paid your consultant, we can't refund that. We can stop you from paying twice.
We're not a legal service and can't reverse an immigration decision. But we are publishing free, public guidance on programme verification so the next student knows what to check before they sign. If you're affected, write to help@settlabroad.com. We will help where we can.
Two students who made the move themselves, paid the consultant tax, and got burned anyway. We built Settl Abroad so the next student wouldn't have to go through what we did.
Settl Abroad
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