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NewThe Duolingo for self-study

Turn any heavy PDF into bite-sized daily lessons.

Drop in a textbook, paper or manual. DuckEars builds a gamified curriculum that fits your deadline — then locks it into long-term memory with AI quizzes on a spaced-repetition loop that knows exactly when you’re about to forget.

Join 2,412+ learners already in line

  • Free forever tier
  • No credit card
  • Early access this quarter
How it works

Three steps between you and the thing you're trying to learn

No syllabus building. No flashcard grind. Upload, set a deadline, show up for five minutes a day.

app.duckearshq.com / new-course
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Drop your PDF here

or paste a link · EPUB, slides and notes welcome

PDF

OrganicChem_Ch7.pdf

Ready
PDF

Kinetics_lecture_notes.pdf

64%
Built for focus

Made for brains that stall on page 12

A 400-page PDF asks three things of you before you learn anything: decide what to read, hold the plan in your head, and stay with it long enough to feel a reward. DuckEars takes all three jobs off you.

One decision, already made

You never open the app and wonder where to start. Today's lesson is queued, sized and waiting — the hardest part of studying is already done.

Five minutes is a real session

Lessons are short enough to start on a bad day and still count. No 90-minute block to psych yourself into, no all-or-nothing guilt.

The plan lives outside your head

Deadlines, intervals and what's due next are the app's job, not your working memory. Close it for four days and it reshuffles instead of collapsing.

Feedback every twenty seconds

Active recall answers back immediately. Re-reading a page is easy to drift away from; being asked a question is much harder to ignore.

Designed with executive function in mind — which is why people studying with ADHD are some of the learners we build for most deliberately. DuckEars is a study tool, not a medical device, a diagnosis or a treatment.

Why DuckEars

Everything a study app should have done years ago

Built around one idea: the best curriculum is the one that adapts to how quickly you actually forget.

Core engine

AI quizzes written from your own material

Not generic trivia. Every question is generated from the exact page you uploaded, cited back to the source, and rewritten when you keep missing it.

Generated · p. 214

Rank these carbocations from most to least stable.

Tertiary
Secondary
Primary

Why: alkyl groups donate electron density, stabilising the positive charge. Cited from §7.3.

Tune it:Too easyToo wordyAsk again later

Spaced repetition that actually adapts

Miss a card and it comes back tomorrow. Nail it three times and it disappears for a month.

🧠

Modelled recall over 12 weeks

2.4x
Better 30-day recall
-58%
Time spent re-reading
6 min
Median daily session
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Deadline-aware scheduling

Exam on the 14th? We compress, reshuffle and prioritise so you finish with room to spare.

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Progress you can feel

Streaks, XP, mastery per chapter — and an honest “you’re 61% exam-ready” score.

Exam readiness61%
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Works on the subway

Lessons cache to your device and sync the moment you’re back online. Streak intact.

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Bring anything readable

PDFs, EPUBs, lecture slides, scanned notes. If you can read it, DuckEars can teach it.

  • PDF
  • EPUB
  • PPTX
  • DOCX
  • Scans
  • arXiv Soon
Early beta

1,200 beta testers. A suspicious number of streaks.

What people told us after four weeks with an early build.

“I fed it a 600-page pharmacology text on a Sunday. By Monday I had a 9-week plan I actually stuck to.”
Amara O.Med student, UCL
“The review timing is uncanny. A card resurfaces exactly when I'm starting to go fuzzy on it.”
Jonas T.PhD candidate, ETH
“Anki without the six hours of card-making. That alone is worth the subscription.”
Rhea K.Actuarial trainee
“I finally finished a machine learning textbook I'd been 40 pages into for two years.”
Luis N.Backend engineer
“My streak is at 47 days. I have never once studied 47 days in a row in my life.”
Priya S.CFA Level II
“It quotes the page number for every answer, so I trust it in a way I don't trust a chatbot.”
Tomás R.Law student, USP
“Uploaded our 300-page onboarding manual and the whole new-hire cohort used it. Wild.”
Erin M.L&D lead
“ADHD brain here. Not having to decide what to study is the entire reason I have opened it 31 days in a row.”
Kwame B.Self-taught dev
Pricing

Priced like a coffee, not like a textbook

Waitlist members lock in launch pricing for their first year. The free tier never expires, and every paid plan states its limits up front — no surprise throttling.

Switch to annual — two months free on every paid plan

Free Learner

$0/month

Free forever

Try the whole thing, no card needed.

  • 3 courses on the go at once
  • Documents up to 150 pages (25 MB) each
  • Up to 300 pages turned into lessons a month
  • Uploads processed in turn — usually a few minutes
  • Daily lessons and reviews on the standard schedule
  • Streaks and XP to keep you showing up
  • Works on web and mobile
Start free

No card needed

Most popular

Pro Scholar

$9/month

Billed monthly · cancel any time

For a full course load with real deadlines.

Everything in Free, plus

  • 25 courses on the go at once
  • Documents up to 1,000 pages (250 MB) each
  • Up to 2,000 pages turned into lessons a month
  • Your uploads skip the line — lessons ready in about a minute
  • Reviews that adapt to what you keep forgetting
  • Set an exam date and the plan reshapes itself to hit it
  • Choose your own daily target and streak rules
  • Study offline — on the train, in the air — it syncs when you're back
Get Pro Scholar

Cancel any time

Grad Scholar

$14/month

Billed monthly · cancel any time

For juggling several subjects, or one very big project.

Everything in Pro, plus

  • 50 courses on the go at once
  • Documents up to 2,500 pages (500 MB) each
  • Up to 3,000 pages turned into lessons a month
  • Combine several documents into one course
  • Take your cards with you — export to Anki or a spreadsheet
Get Grad Scholar

Cancel any time

Researcher

$29/month

Billed monthly · cancel any time

For academics and professionals with a library, not a textbook.

Everything in Grad, plus

  • 100 courses on the go at once
  • Documents up to 5,000 pages (1 GB) each
  • Up to 4,000 pages turned into lessons a month
  • Our most capable AI writes your lessons — sharper questions, fewer misreads of dense material
  • Pull papers straight in from Zotero, Notion or arXiv Coming soon
  • New features land here first
Get Researcher

Cancel any time

How pages are counted

Pages count when we turn them into lessons, not when you upload. Upload a 400-page textbook and study 60 pages of it this month, and you’ve used 60. Lessons are made a few days ahead of where you are, so you only spend pages on what you’re actually studying.

If you reach your monthly pages, your courses pause until the 1st — or upgrade to carry on straight away. The per-document limits (pages and file size) still apply when you upload.

Prices in USD, excluding any local tax. Student and academic discounts available at launch · Cancel any time.