Learning and careers decision
Learn Farsi
A single technical contributor can reproduce the core product (lessons, SRS, progress sync, audio, payments) in a few months and run it for modest monthly costs; the site’s apparent costs and lack of entrenched moats make building a replacement realistic.
Visit website↗Built by Thomas van Welsenes, who ships 3 products in this index
$5/mo
$60/yr
Read off the official pricing page.
$100one-off160 h to build
$106/mo6 h/mo upkeep
On cash alone, building overtakes the subscription at 23 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 Learn Farsi alternatives, with the arithmetic →
What a replacement has to do
- Present lessons and audio → record learner answers/progress → schedule reviews with spaced repetition → play lesson audio / TTS → sync progress to account → optional payments for supporters/products
What it still won’t have
- Brand, existing user base and community momentum
- Polish of mobile apps (iOS/Android) unless separately built
- Any proprietary content curation or editorial work already accumulated
- Built-in supporters/donation plumbing and site-specific badges/pages
What remains hard
- Product polish and ongoing maintenance
First-year cost
Keep paying
Paying is—cheaper in year one.
On cash alone, building overtakes the subscription at 23 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 Learn Farsi clone as a web app using Next.js + TypeScript for frontend, Supabase (Postgres) for auth and storage, Vercel for hosting, and Stripe for payments. Scope in: lesson pages (static/Markdown-driven), audio playback (hosted assets or external TTS integration), user sign-up/login, per-user progress records, a basic spaced-repetition scheduler (SM-2 or similar) with endpoints to fetch due items and record reviews, one-time product purchases and a monthly supporter flow, and a small admin UI to manage lessons. Out of scope: native iOS/Android apps, large editorial import, advanced analytics, and training proprietary ML models. Include error handling, unit/integration tests for scheduler and payment flows, and deployment scripts (Vercel + Supabase).
How we checked
How the score was reached
- Partly verdict base52
- An open-source build was found+5
- 5 cited sources+3
- Price verified on pricing page+3
- Evidence score63
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 · 5
Every page the run actually retrieved.
- official productLearn Farsi — homepage
- official pricingLearn Farsi — support and costs
- official pricingLearn Farsi — supporter tiers & products
- open sourcemengxi-ream/read-frog
- open sourceecho-loop/Echo-Loop
Integrity checks
What held up, and what did not.
