CHOOSEActAL
The independent directory for Alabama's CHOOSE Act education savings account program. We built it, launched it, and run it, and it is the first deployment of the Encontra platform.
Owner & operator
Alabama, USA
February 2026
Live, earning
The state gives families a PDF and wishes them luck.
Alabama's CHOOSE Act lets eligible families direct state education funds to approved providers, including tutors, therapists, curriculum publishers, microschools, and private schools. What families receive is a static list, with the searching, the filtering, the detail, and the contact information all left for them to work out.
So families take the PDF to a Facebook group and ask strangers, while providers sit on an approved list that is hard to read. Everyone ends up doing more work than the program intended, and improving it sits outside anyone's job description.
A directory that behaves like a product.
We built search and filtering that match how families look for help, profiles that providers claim, verify, and manage themselves, and tools around the part families told us hurts most, which is getting an invoice accepted the first time.
Live, used, and paid for on both sides.
Roughly 900 approved providers and 270 participating schools are listed, and more than 200 providers have verified ownership and now manage their own listing. Families search and browse for free, and the paid tier exists for the households doing the heavy operational lifting.
The most consequential decision sits outside the numbers. Adding the second state is a matter of configuration and data ingestion, because that call was made before the first line of Alabama code. It is the reason this is a platform and not simply a website.