Why "Merito"
Merito is Italian for merit. It's the word at the heart of the process itself: after every criterion is argued, USCIS weighs the file in a final merits determination. We named the product after the standard it prepares you for — not the forms, not the process, the merits.
How we work
Our commitments, in plain terms.
Not a privacy policy — a plain-language account of the specific choices we've made and why, so you know exactly what you're trusting us with.
Your data is yours
Your documents live in private, access-controlled storage tied to your account — never a shared or public bucket. You can export or delete your account and everything in it at any time from Settings. Deletion begins a 14-day grace period (in case you change your mind), then is permanent — including every document, Case File, and report.
Never used to train models
Analysis features send parts of your structured Case File to our AI processing provider, Anthropic, to generate the requested output. Under our agreement with them, they do not use your data to train their models — yours or anyone else's. Your content is also always framed as data to be analyzed, never as instructions the AI should follow, as a defense against a document trying to manipulate the analysis of itself.
Code before AI, wherever code can do the job
Link validity, page counts, exhibit numbering, date consistency, language detection, document quality — anything that has a deterministic right answer is checked by plain code, not an AI guess. Merito Audit's checks run this way by design. AI is reserved for judgment calls that genuinely need it: reading a paragraph the way an officer would, drafting language, finding a pattern across a corpus.
No approval percentages, ever
Merito is not a law firm and does not predict outcomes. Every tool is framed as a readiness review — what the record currently supports, what's missing, what an officer might flag — never a probability, score-to-odds conversion, or approval likelihood. A standard disclaimer accompanies every result for exactly this reason.
Citations are verified against the real record, not just generated
When a tool references a past AAO decision — in Case Matcher, Debate Mode, or RFE Studio — that citation is checked against the actual retrieved corpus before it's shown to you. A citation the AI generates but that doesn't match a real, retrieved decision is stripped out rather than displayed as if it were real.
Security posture, summarized
Every user's data is isolated by database-level row security, not just application logic — a bug in one page can't leak another user's case. Uploads are validated by their actual file content, not just the filename or claimed type. Any outbound link-checking Merito does on your behalf is blocked from ever reaching private or internal network addresses. Every AI call is logged and cost-tracked; a spend circuit breaker halts AI-consuming tools automatically if usage ever spikes unexpectedly, rather than letting it run unattended.
Community is real people, not bots
Posting requires a real account. Every post is checked by a moderation pass before it's visible to others, watching for spam, personal information, and requests for individualized legal advice (which even attorneys among our members can't ethically give in a public forum).
None of this is a substitute for advice from a licensed immigration attorney. It's the specific, checkable list of what we do — and don't do — with your case.