Seven steps from overwhelmed to ready.
Most parents come to Gardenia mid-process — somewhere between the diagnosis and the next meeting. Here's the path. You can stop at any step. Free covers the first three.
- Step 1
Create your workspace.
Sign up with email and a password. We confirm the address (one tap), set up a private workspace, and ask one question: who's the workspace for? You — or you and a partner / co-parent / grandparent? Family members come in by email invite later.
Ninety seconds. The shortest part of the whole process.Time
~90 seconds
Plan
Free
- Step 2
Add your child.
First name, optional last initial, grade, school, state, suspected and confirmed diagnoses, primary language. The state matters — it shapes which letter templates and deadline rules you'll see. Diagnoses stay private; we use them only to surface the right modules and questions.
Time
~3 minutes
Plan
Free
- Step 3
Upload the IEP (or 504, eval, notice — whatever you have).
Drag the PDF onto the document vault. AES-256 encrypts it on the way in. Tag the type so the right downstream workflows turn on. We accept PDF, Word, Excel, plain text, and common image formats up to 50 MB per file.
If you only have a paper copy, scanning to PDF on your phone works fine.Time
~2 minutes
Plan
Free up to 3 documents
- Step 4
Summarize the document.
Open the document and click "Tell us about this document." Fill in the goals, services, accommodations, concerns, and questions you have — section by section. The form takes about 10 minutes for a typical IEP. (When AI summaries are re-enabled, this step auto-completes; you'll just edit.)
Time
~10 minutes
Plan
Free
- Step 5
Draft the letter you've been putting off.
Records request? Evaluation consent? IEE request? Pick one of 30 Nicole-voice templates, fill in the prompts, click generate. The letter pulls your child's data automatically and produces a PDF with your letterhead. Free plan: one letter per month. Parent Pro: unlimited.
“The letter you've been putting off is usually the one you needed three weeks ago.”Time
~5 minutes
Plan
Free (1/mo)
- Step 6
Schedule the next meeting — with prep.
Add the date and time. Gardenia auto-builds a meeting prep packet from your manual or AI summary: the questions you should ask, the concerns to flag, the talking points scaffolded. Print it. Bring it. Mark it up during the meeting.
Time
~3 minutes
Plan
Free
- Step 7
Walk in. Walk out. Update the workspace.
Take notes during the meeting. After, capture the outcomes: what changed, what didn't, what the next-action is. The workspace becomes your living history of the child's special-education path — which matters more in year three than year one.
Time
~5 minutes after
Plan
Free
Your records, encrypted. Your access, audited.
Documents live in private Supabase Storage with AES-256 at rest and signed-URL downloads that expire in 60 seconds. Every read, write, and access grant is written to an immutable audit log you can export.
Row-level security in Postgres enforces that family members and granted advocates only see what the parent has explicitly shared. Service-role bypasses are restricted to server-side code that has already verified the actor.
Account deletion is two-click and permanent: a 10-minute confirmation token plus a tombstone we keep for 7 years (so chargebacks and subpoenas can still resolve) without retaining any of the actual record content.
Step 1 takes ninety seconds.
Sign up, add your child, upload one document. The next steps will be there when you're ready.
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