For a long time, a lot of education apps have put up a paywall, or held you hostage for 30 seconds behind an ad before you get to the educational content. Maybe that was reasonable. There was a price to creating content, and there was a price to creating the software to deliver it.
With AI, both content creation and software creation are being commoditized, and both are trending towards zero.
So now is the time to really rethink the business model for microlearning, and for education in general. If the cost of creating content and microlearning apps is trending towards zero, then the cost to the people learning should trend towards zero too.
It isn't only about cost. We can now create content at scale, in parallel, and for very specific reasons. Learning doesn't have to be one course built for everybody.
I think the big opportunity is to make learning free, personal, fun, and about any topic.
Free. No subscription, no paywall, no ads, nothing to buy, and no account. I don't want to put a gate in front of any sort of learning, or really even the experience, and I want the experience to be the same for everybody.
Fun. Short cards, games, podcasts and short videos. Something you pick up in a spare minute, not a lecture you have to get through.
Personal, and about any topic. Over time, these two become the same thing. Today we build every pack ourselves: 64 so far, on money, philosophy, Spanish, national parks, the civics test and trivia. The feed, the games and the review follow where you are in each one. The vision is user-directed pack creation on any topic. You say what you want to learn, and the pack can be as specific as your learning need: regional Italian so you can cook with your grandmother, how to repair your 2015 Volkswagen GTI, traveling to San Francisco in June on a budget, the plants that will actually survive in your Tucson backyard, helping your kid with fourth-grade fractions.
Ultimately, the goal is to really scale this, so that any content can be created.
How does it pay for itself? We're still figuring that out, but the essence is simple: anything that gets created is free, and will stay free. We're building a studio where you can add to the content yourself, plus AI skills and MCP servers so you can build a pack with the AI assistant you already use. Either way, we'll keep the costs down. The idea is that the person creating a pack covers just the compute and processing it takes to make it, and what comes out is free for everyone.
Private. There are a lot of free products where the user's data is the product. That's how they make their money. That's not the case here. Everything that makes FlashFeed personal happens on your phone, you don't need an account, and your data is your data. We want to build a portable user file, so you can take your progress with you when you switch devices. If a social graph ever adds value, we're open to it, but it will always respect your privacy and anonymity, and it will never be required for any core learning feature.
Open, too. Free goes with open. Every pack is a plain file anyone can read, and you can load your own. What "open" means here, including what isn't done yet, is on the Free and open page.
Gary George, founderOctober 2026