Thaxas vs Anki: Anki is free and excellent. Here's when you'd pay anyway

Anki's honest advantages

• It's free on desktop and Android, and open source. The iOS app is paid, and that money funds the project.
• It's yours. Local files, full export, no company between you and your decks, no chance of a subscription lapsing and taking your cards with it.
• Enormous flexibility — card templates, add-ons, custom scheduling, image occlusion, LaTeX. There is nothing Thaxas does with a card that a determined Anki user cannot do better.
• Shared decks. A vast library of community decks, some of them outstanding.
• Excellent FSRS. The Anki community drove FSRS adoption, and their implementation is the reference most others are measured against.

The gap: making cards is the whole cost

The reviews were never the expensive part of spaced repetition. Making the cards is. Writing a good card — atomic, unambiguous, testing one thing — takes a minute or two, and a semester's material is hundreds of them. Most people who buy into the idea quit somewhere in week three, sitting in front of a deck of forty cards with a vague sense of failure.

Downloading a shared deck solves the labour and creates a worse problem: the deck is somebody else's course. It emphasises what their lecturer emphasised, uses their notation, and quietly omits the three things your exam is actually about.

Thaxas generates the cards from your own uploads — your slides, your readings, your handwriting — and then schedules them with real FSRS. That is the entire trade: you are paying to skip the card-writing, on a deck that is specifically yours.

Side by side

_Written in July 2026 from publicly available information. These products ship constantly, so check their site before you decide — and tell us if we've got something wrong._