About YourSubjects
What this is, who makes it, and how it pays for itself.
What it is
YourSubjects is a free study workspace. A subject holds its own notes, flashcards, practice questions, exam papers, uploaded files and mindmap, and it keeps track of what you've read, learned and got wrong. It runs in a browser, on any device, with nothing to install.
Alongside it, this site publishes a set of guides on how to study — written up from the research literature, in plain language, with the limitations of each technique stated rather than glossed over.
Why it exists
It started as a personal tool. The revision material for a single subject was spread across a notes app, a flashcard app, a folder of PDFs and a stack of printed past papers, and none of those four things knew about the others. Testing yourself on Tuesday what you read on Sunday meant rebuilding the material into a testable form first, and that friction is where good intentions go to die.
The design follows from that. Everything for one subject lives in one place, so the step between "I have read this" and "I am testing myself on this" is small enough that you'll actually take it.
Who makes it
One person, as a personal project, alongside other work. It is not a company, it has no staff, and there is no roadmap document. Bugs get fixed when they're found and features get added when they're needed.
That's worth knowing before you rely on it for something important: keep your own copies of anything you can't afford to lose, as you would with any small free service.
How it's paid for
The app is free and has no paid tier, no trial and no upsell. The running costs — a server, a domain — are covered partly out of pocket and partly by advertising on the guide pages of this site.
Where the ads are is a deliberate line, not an accident of layout:
- Guide articles carry ads. They're labelled, they sit between sections of the article, and they never interrupt a sentence.
- The app carries none. No banner on the subject view, none during flashcards or practice, and — emphatically — none while a paper is being sat.
- Policy and contact pages carry none.
Nothing in the app is placed to push you towards an ad, and no study feature is degraded to make an ad more valuable. If that ever stops being true, this paragraph should be the first thing to change.
The guides
Each guide is written from the primary literature where possible, and every one lists its sources at the foot so you can check them. Where the evidence is strong — retrieval practice, distributed practice — the guide says so. Where it's thinner, or where a well-known result has had a rocky replication history, the guide says that too, rather than quietly presenting it as settled.
They are written by a person, edited by a person, and are not generated in bulk. If you find something wrong in one, please say so — corrections are welcome and the pages get updated.
Your data
Short version: without an account, your work stays in your browser and never reaches the server. With an account, it's stored so you can reach it from other devices, and you can delete the whole account and everything in it from inside the app. The privacy page sets out the detail.
Get in touch
Bug reports, corrections to the guides and feature requests are all welcome. Contact details are here.