About Diplonaut

Diplonaut is an independent, free resource that gathers the official rules for international students, including visas, money to show, tuition, work rights and degree recognition, straight from the governments that set them, and organizes them so you can compare them in minutes.

Why we exist

Deciding to study in another country is one of the biggest decisions a person can make, and it is surrounded by myths, outdated advice and people with something to sell. An entire industry has grown around international students: recruitment agents paid per enrollment, “fast-track” and “guaranteed” services, and intermediaries whose incentives are not the student’s. In some countries, students have arrived with fraudulent admission letters, or discovered too late that a program did not lead where they were promised. It is rarely clear who profits, but too often it is at the student’s expense.

Dishonesty is not only on one side. Some applicants use a student visa as a shortcut to something else, with no real intention to study: forged documents, invented funds, enrollment in programs they never attend. Their choices have consequences for everyone else. Governments respond with caps, stricter checks and longer processing times, and genuine students end up facing more suspicion and more paperwork for mistakes they didn’t make. Fraud, whoever commits it, makes an already complex system harder for the people it is meant to serve.

Most of these problems depend on one thing: information that is scattered, buried in bureaucracy, or hard to verify. Higher education and immigration are bureaucratic almost everywhere. We believe the first defense is simple: the real rules, from the real source, organized and clear, for everyone who wants to study honestly.

What we believe

The Greeks called the pursuit of knowledge philosophia, the love of wisdom, and they called truth alētheia, literally “what is not concealed.” Knowledge was meant to be pursued for its own sake. Today, education is often reduced to a token: a degree bought to “open doors,” with students treated as customers or commissions.

Diplonaut is a small attempt to return to the older idea: to bring what is concealed into plain view, so that anyone, anywhere, can make their own informed choice. Our name joins diploma, from the Greek díplōma, a folded document, with nautēs, a sailor: a name for those setting out.

The first diplomas tell the same story. Around 149 CE, a Roman infantryman named Dasmenus Azalus, born in the Near East, received two bronze tablets, folded together and officially sealed. They recorded that, after twenty-five years of service, he and his fellow veterans of foreign birth had been granted Roman citizenship and the right to marry legally. His copy is kept today at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. From the start, a diploma was a document that let a person born elsewhere belong somewhere new.

How we work

• Official sources only. Every figure links to the ministry, immigration service or government publication that decides it. Where no official source exists yet, we say so.
• Checked every 3 hours, always dated. A monitor scans the official sources every 3 hours. Each change is verified on the official page and shown with the date it takes effect.
• Independent. No school, agent or paid service can pay to appear, rank higher, or change what we show.
• Official steps, made visible. Some paid steps are legitimate and even required, such as government-designated credential evaluations. Our aim is to show you which steps are official, what they cost, and how to do them directly, without intermediaries.
• Free and private. No account needed, and your comparator settings stay in your own browser.
• Corrected in public. When something is wrong, we correct it against the official source and date the correction. Report an error →

How Diplonaut is funded

Diplonaut is independently run. It may one day earn money, for example through clearly labeled partners, sponsorships or optional paid features. If it does, three things will not change: the official information stays free, no one can pay to change what the comparator shows, and anything paid or sponsored will be labeled as such.

Diplonaut provides information, not legal or immigration advice. It is a small endeavor with one aim: that no one pays for information that should be free, or loses years to a promise that was never true.