I’m an educator using Anki as the core tool in a structured, guided study program (board exam preparation). The value I provide is not just the decks themselves, but the orientation, workflow, and coaching around how the decks are used.
I’d like to ask for guidance from the community on best practices for situations like this.
Specifically:
Are there recommended ways to manage access to decks that are part of a paid or guided program, without adding DRM or breaking Anki’s open philosophy?
Is the usual approach to rely on AnkiWeb sharing, time-limited access, or private add-ons?
For those who’ve built paid educational programs around Anki, what has worked well for you in practice?
To be clear, I’m not asking for DRM or forced restrictions in Anki itself. I’m more interested in understanding what patterns the community considers acceptable and sustainable for educators using Anki commercially.
Any insights, experiences, or pointers would be greatly appreciated.
Thank you, and thank you as well for maintaining such a powerful learning tool.
There are very few resources available on how to monetize or close source Anki, some reasons: (I’m not related to the official Anki or mod)
Much of Anki’s resources are developed by kind volunteers who provide them for free. Volunteers prefer open source and want users to be able to use it for free. Typically they dislike monetization, paywalls, and closed source, so they neither develop nor provide resources for closed sourcing or monetization. Rather many Anki users consider monetization unethical and often oppose it.
Legally monetization is possible because the license permits anyone to freely use the code including monetization, so there are already projects that have been monetized in this way. But how this is done is generally not made public because developers working for profit have no interest in open sourcing or contributing. Such motives do not exist for them because disclosing their methods would increase competition and reduce their profits. It’s likely that the official Anki is partially the same, if they released all the code there’s a risk they wouldn’t be able to operate so AnkiWeb and iOS are closed source.
So basically only non profit volunteers can receive support for resources and methods within the Anki community for now. There is no support for developers who charge fees or use closed-source development so they’ll likely need to research and develop on their own.
There are occasional requests from teachers at mostly non profit schools but Anki is optimized for individual use and not for organizations so there aren’t many resources available for them. There are some discussions about school and Anki in this thread.
AnkiForums thread: Anki in schools
You’re so right, Shigeyuki. Without multi-user management and educational strategy, Anki does not reach even 1% of its potential.
Here’s a strategic vision with implementation details intentionally hidden. Will ultimately be Open Source but kept under wraps until release. For that I need a partner. Anyone interested is welcome to be directly in touch at ytmeitar@gmail.com.
Hi yitzhakbg, your project seems to be progressing smoothly.
In my opinion the most difficult challenge in developing Anki for schools so far is that such a program would become a competitor learning app to Anki. So such projects may need permission from the official Anki, otherwise they will likely need to work and develop outside the Anki community. Since you seem to be planning to develop your own app, I think that possibility probably looks relatively high. (but I’m not related to the official Anki and AnkiDroid developers so I don’t know exactly, if they permit it I think it should be fine.)
Absolutely not, Shigeyuki. Same Anki with no changes at all, only manageable, friendly and most importantly, opens a wealth of monetization opportunities enticing developers.
For now I don’t know the details of your project so I can’t say. If your new app allows reviewing it will compete with the official AnkMobile and AnkiDroid. In that case development is legally possible, but competition will arise so I think it’s likely to face opposition from the community(as far as I know, such apps have all been rejected by dedicated Anki users). If reviews are completely impossible this conflict issue won’t arise, they are often considered supplementary tools for Anki.
To be clear this doesn’t mean I oppose your project, such apps could likely be useful and better, I’m also optimistic about such projects. It simply means this is often the case as far as I know, this is just my speculation so it might not actually be true.
Some deck authors use AnkiHub to manage deck access and distribution. AnkiHub doesn’t remove deck access after the subscription expires, and has no protection against unauthorized sharing (These are the hard problems that are probably almost impossible to solve without significant changes to Anki). That’s probably not an issue for you if the value of your program is not in the deck itself, as you said. AnkiHub only makes it easier to manage payment for initial access and share updates easily.
Thanks for your feedback Shigeyuki. Let me repeat: No competing application here. No touching Anki. No competition with Anki. Hoisting Anki into the multi-user realm with accompanying strategy for deployment in educational systems spawns a marketplace for monetized value added products and services akin to The Wordpress MarketPlace which doesn’t compete with Wordpress. To the contrary, the marketplace accelerates Wordpress, Other than Anking and a few other smaller players, there is nothing comparable in the Anki ecosystem and there is little incentive so long as Anki remains solely in the domain of the individual, self-motivated user.
The key lies in introducing retention (with Anki) with curriculum-suited practice decks as a core instructional tool in educational systems requiring no need for knowing Anki itself by students or educators any more than visitors to Wordpress hosted sites know anything about Wordpress.
Best,
Yitzhak ytmeitar@gmail.com
A user can send a deck of cards from one profile to another in real time on the same network, and the other user can accept or decline receiving this deck.
A user can view another user’s deck in real time, and the other user can choose whether or not to show the card.
The Admin (teacher) profile can create a class and add students to that class. They can send the same deck to multiple users (students) simultaneously according to the class.
To gain access to the professor (admin) user, you would have to tell me your username, and then I would add you there.
It has statistics for each user and the decks they created that day. It’s still in the testing phase, so I’ve only tested it on the same network; I don’t know if it works on different networks.