The method is not the hard part. Nobody abandons spaced repetition because the algorithm was wrong; they abandon it because making four hundred cards was never going to happen.
Bigger sets read more of your document. Included with Student and Genius.
PDF, PowerPoint, Word, or a link · up to 10 MB · start without an account
Notes, a chapter, or a deck of slides. The cards are written from it, so there is no build phase to get through first.
A question you get right advances its streak, and 2 clean passes mark it as mastered. Getting it wrong sends it back to the start.
What you missed returns in the daily review, and what you mastered eventually returns too, because nothing stays learned forever.
Three lines of anatomy revision, and the card that comes back into your review from them. Sample material, written by us to show the shape of the output.
The notes you uploaded
Cranial nerve notes, pasted
A card in your review
A patient cannot wrinkle their forehead on the affected side. Is the lesion upper or lower motor neuron?
Lower motor neuron. The forehead is spared in an upper motor neuron lesion because it receives bilateral cortical input, so forehead involvement points to the facial nerve itself.
This card came back on its third review. It was missed once, half recalled once, and only the pass after that started the streak that will eventually mark it as mastered.
Flashcards and written recall come with Student and Genius. The scored quiz over the same questions is free on every plan, and the review rotation runs across whichever modes your plan includes.
Every other tool here starts with an empty deck and your evening. This starts with your material and produces something to review the same day.
Answering the same question right twice in ten minutes is not two days of spacing. A streak can only advance once every 6 hours, so a single evening cannot certify a whole set as learned.
After 14 days without a review, a mastered question rejoins the weak pile. Without that, a growing library fills with permanently finished cards and the daily review starves.
An answer you nearly had is neither a pass nor a failure. It advances the streak but can never complete it, so a half-recalled idea is never certified as known.
Want the theory behind the spacing? Read our guide to the forgetting curve.
It is a deliberately simple spacing rule rather than a scheduler, and the difference is worth understanding before you choose. There are no due dates, no intervals computed per card, and no implementation of SM-2 or FSRS. What exists is a streak: answer a question correctly and it advances, but only once every 6 hours, so two rounds in one evening cannot walk a set to mastery. After 2 qualifying passes a question counts as mastered and leaves the weak pile, and after 14 days without review it lapses back into it. That is the whole mechanism. If you want a finely tuned interval per card, Anki is genuinely better at this and free, and we say so. What this does instead is remove the reason most people never start.
Because grading recall as a pure right or wrong throws away the most informative outcome you produce. A written answer that captured the idea but missed a condition is not the same event as a blank, and treating both as failures resets a streak that had genuinely progressed, which makes the app feel arbitrary and punishes honest self-assessment. So there are three outcomes rather than two: missed, partial, and recalled. A partial advances the streak, which is the reward for real progress, but it is capped so that partials alone can never complete one. The effect is that a question you keep half remembering stays in rotation until you produce it cleanly, while still showing you moving forward instead of sitting at zero for a fortnight. Quiz and flashcard rounds only ever produce the two extremes, so the middle outcome is something written recall alone can register.
Because a question you answered correctly a month ago is not evidence about today, and an app that pretends otherwise slowly stops being useful. Each mastered question is stamped with when it was last reviewed, and once 14 days have passed it returns to the weak pile to be earned again. The alternative is what happens in most self-built systems: the mastered pile grows monotonically, the review queue empties, and the app starts reporting that you know a subject you have not tested yourself on since term started. Lapsing keeps the daily review populated from a library that would otherwise silence itself, and it means the badge on your dashboard describes recent evidence. The cost is that finishing something is never permanent, which is also true of your memory. The window is measured in elapsed hours rather than calendar days, so studying either side of midnight does not accidentally count as two separate days of spacing.
The spacing itself is not the thing that is charged for; the modes are. Scored multiple choice runs on every tier and carries the same streaks, lapses, and weak pile described here, so a Free account gets genuine spaced review over 2 generated sets at no cost. Studying those same questions as flashcards, or as written recall where you produce the answer from an empty box, needs Student at $14.99 a month with 100 generations, or Genius at $59.99 for a year under a 1000 monthly fair-use ceiling. Reviewing what you already generated is never charged again on any plan, so the cost tracks how much new material you feed in rather than how hard you study it. A learner who uploads two sets and drills them for a term pays nothing at all.
For most people, no, and the honest comparison is worth reading: the best spaced repetition apps, and the best Anki alternatives.