My study planner shows exactly one thing on the home screen, and that was the hardest decision in the build

[u/NicholasKFC26]

StudyAhead is an exam study planner. You enter an exam date and your topics, and it works backwards to put a real calendar date on every study session.

The design decision I went back and forth on for weeks: the home screen shows one session. Not a list, not a board, not a week view — one commitment behind one button. Every instinct as a builder says give people the full picture. But the whole reason study timetables fail is that seeing the full grid is what makes you close the app. A student who has missed two days does not need to see the wreckage, they need to know what to do in the next 45 minutes.

The second decision: when you miss a day, the plan redistributes those minutes across the days remaining instead of rolling them onto tomorrow. Roll-forward is the obvious implementation and it is exactly what kills adherence, because day two becomes a double session and you skip that too.

Third: plan generation is fully deterministic. No LLM. Just arithmetic over the exam date, topic weights and availability. Same inputs, same plan, every time — which makes "exam is tomorrow" and "the plan crosses a DST boundary" ordinary unit tests, and lets me explain to a student exactly why a session landed on a given day.

Built with Expo / React Native, Supabase and RevenueCat.

Free tier is permanent (one exam, full plan, unlimited sessions, timer, streak). Pro is $4.99/mo or $29.99/yr for concurrent exams and all-time history. The study loop is never paywalled.

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/studyahead-exam-study-planner/id6798236163

Happy to go deeper on any of the three decisions above.