Can’t thank you enough for all the time spent on this project, from the actual code, packaging & distribution all the way down to answering our (mostly silly) questions on this forum!
Take care @dae
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the last one hits hard, haven’t done my reviews since maybe last september 
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Man I dont really care about this whole anti corporation drama, I just want a new Anki release so that I can see if my allinanki automation works 
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Thank for your kindness
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@dae are you still using Anki, and will you keep a personal fork like Grant Sanderson (aka 3Blue1Brown) did with his Manim?
Hello Damien,
thank you very much for your work over all these years! 
I started using Anki in 2014 to support my learning, and I was truly impressed by how well it worked. Before that, I had spent about 20 years using spaced repetition with physical index cards! But after accumulating a few thousand cards, that method became quite unmanageable… 
I remember asking you a few times if there was a way to donate to you directly, but you declined, apparently due to some tax-related issues — which I still don’t quite understand. (I guess I could have bought the iPhone app, but I’m an Android user.)
In many open-source projects, the biggest challenge is that most of the responsibility falls on a single person. And when that workload becomes too heavy — well, we all know what can happen. That’s why I’ve always been deeply grateful for a FOSS project like Anki, which has been maintained and improved for so many years (many thanks to Sherlock, too!).I’ve sometimes worried that Anki might suddenly stop being developed one day. Personally, I would even prefer to pay for it — to have a license or contract with an organization, just to be sure that the project would continue because more people depend on it. Of course, many people are involved in FOSS projects, but the risk of abrupt endings always felt quite real to me.
So, Damien, I wish you all the best for the future! I hope you’ll earn enough to live comfortably and won’t have to work 40 hours a week just to avoid burnout. Take care!
Thorsten
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Free projects are great. But supporting them is bad, not to mention developing them. The pace of development isn’t very high. That’s fine, but every year more and more free projects appear, and there’s less and less time to improve them. It’s not about programmers burning out; there’s simply not enough time for everything. If someone can support your idea, that’s good; it means you have time for something else.
I’ve also noticed that when someone works on an entire project, they keep all the ideas in their head and maintain a unified approach to everything. And they absolutely must use their project themselves. Sometimes programmers write code, but it seems they don’t use the program; they don’t care how user-friendly it is. Perhaps this has to do with bureaucratic procedures, approvals, and so on. I’ve been waiting for a response for a week… and some wait up to six months for a response from the authors. In that time, I could completely create the program. I have free time now, but later I might not. And paying isn’t always an option. When a programmer chooses a simpler task, they want to earn as much as possible and won’t waste extra time testing and refining algorithms. This is especially true for scaling in Anki. Let’s say you’ve made a couple of notes, and everything works. But if you make millions, what happens to productivity? The idea was to have multiple note types, so that, for example, a code editor wouldn’t be required, and all options would fit in a menu. But when there are too many, problems arise, because to simplify the task, they always say, “We’ll never have anything like this, but when we do, we’ll fix it.”
Anking (AnKingMed, Ankihub) posted a detailed explanation about this on the Anki community on Reddit to answer questions (2026-02-05) so if you need a more detailed explanation or have questions about this I recommend reading those. (I’m not related to Anking or the official Anki so I don’t know if they’re still accepting questions.)
Reddit r/Anki post: Addressing your concerns about Anki and AnkiHub
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Thank you!
@AnkiHub paywalled the cards for Med School (USMLE) made by others! It was a ruthless way to appropriate the intellectual effort of others and make plenty of money.
The “Anking” team made it prohibitively expensive for many people to access the USMLE cards and suddenly the free cards were “forbidden” and deleted. @AnkiHub cannibalized the Anki cards for Med School.
Is “Anki” also going to be paywalled so ruthlessly as the cards for Med School? @dae
@Expertium They will likely try to rip off all the effort from FSRS into a paywall… 
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So far Anking and AnkiHub have monetized their services but also engage in many non-profit activities. e.g. volunteer development for Anki, donations to AnkiDroid, free access to paid courses on how to use Anki(Anking mastery course), and making paid add-ons free. AnkiHub is also free for anyone to use if they apply, technically the Anking deck is still free, and users can redistribute it.
Also they sell large quantities of the $25 AnkiMobile to medical students. As far as I know selling AnkiMobile does not generate revenue for the seller, in such cases developers typically create and sell their own apps and retaining 100% of the revenue, so third party or advanced developers often create their own web services that compete with Anki but AnkiHub does not do this.
This is likely why the official Anki and Anki volunteers haven’t objected to it. In short among third party services Ankihub is the most cooperative with Anki, other third party services do not volunteer and are developing services that compete with Anki.
Open source Anki projects are strongly protected by their licenses and volunteer developers(Desktop, AnkiDroid). The official AnkiMobile and AnkiWeb developed by Anki are closed source business projects from the start and are separate projects. So even after management shifted to Ankihub, the open source Anki project continues to be developed collaboratively by volunteers. FSRS is a separate project from Anki so it has no relation to Anki. (Anki and Anking have supported them through donations in the past.)
But I’m not related to the official Anki or AnkiHub so I don’t know the exact details of this info or their future activities, since the future is uncertain, I think it’s not impossible that the policy could change in the future as some users are concerned.
For users concerned about AnkiHub (Anking) activities I recommend supporting the developers of AnkiDroid. The official Anki develops the open source Anki for desktop but AnkiMobile and AnkiWeb are closed source and commercial thus the official Anki is not a fully non profit organization or a fully open source project. In short the integration of Anki and Ankihub only updates the business part of Anki, there is no significant difference from how Anki has worked until now.
In contrast AnkiDroid is a fully non profit open source project funded by donations, they are almost the official Anki but technically they are a separate organization and are not operated by the official Anki. By expanding their operations they are likely to act as a deterrent against commercialization or closed source conversion, so I think they are ideal for users who want Anki to be fully open source and non profit, in any case their activities are beneficial to nearly all Anki users.
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