Learning and careers decision
Brilliant
A single developer can build a useful, smaller interactive tutor (lessons, feedback, basic adaptivity), but cannot cheaply recreate Brilliant's professionally authored curriculum, polish, scale, and ongoing content pipeline — so building is viable for a narrow replacement but not a full substitute.
Visit website↗$24.99/mo
$300/yr
Not verified against a pricing page.
$100one-off80 h to build
$200/mo10 h/mo upkeep
On cash alone, building overtakes the subscription at 9 seats.
Open-source builds that already do this
Every project below is open source and already does this job today. Fork one, self-host it, or take the parts you need - the build prompt further down assumes an empty file, and this is the shortcut past that. Licences differ; check the one on each card before you ship. All Brilliant alternatives, with the arithmetic →
What a replacement has to do
- Present an interactive problem, accept user input, give stepwise feedback/hints, record mastery and recommend next problem.
What it still won’t have
- Curriculum authored by award-winning teachers and learning designers
- Scale, polish, and breadth of 40+ professionally produced interactive courses
- Branded trust and large user community
- Ongoing content additions and pedagogy research (AI Evals for Learning Games)
What remains hard
- Brand trust
Built by top learning experts from MIT and Harvard.
- Execution quality
Award-winning learning that’s effective and fun
First-year cost
Keep paying
Paying is—cheaper in year one.
On cash alone, building overtakes the subscription at 9 seats.
Money you would actually spend
Time you would spend
—
What you would spend
What we assumed
The verdict above measures whether you could build it. This one is only about money.
Runnable build prompt
Build a minimal interactive tutoring web app using Next.js + React frontend, a Node/Express API, and Postgres. Scope: (1) implement a lesson player that renders JSON-defined problems with interactive visuals and accepts answers, (2) record attempts and timestamps in Postgres, (3) implement a simple rule-based mastery engine that updates per-problem mastery and selects the next problem, (4) provide basic user registration/login and progress dashboard, (5) provide an admin JSON uploader to add courses. Out of scope: authoring UI for rich visual editors, large catalog of polished content, and offline apps. Include error handling, access control, and unit/integration tests for API endpoints and the mastery engine. Document setup, migrations, and a single-command local dev run.
How we checked
How the score was reached
- Partly verdict base52
- An open-source build was found+5
- 4 cited sources+3
- Evidence score60
The base comes from the verdict. Everything under it is a check that either happened or did not, and each one is a fact frozen in this record rather than a judgement made at render time - so the same evidence always produces the same number.
How scoring works →Cited sources · 4
Every page the run actually retrieved.
- official productBrilliant | Learn by doing
- official pricingBrilliant Premium | Brilliant
- open sourcekirilxd/claude-tutor
- open sourcezijinz456/OpenTutor
Integrity checks
What held up, and what did not.
