YouLearn turns your PDFs, slides, YouTube videos and recorded lectures into summaries, cited answers, quizzes and practice exams, with an AI tutor you can question directly and a free tier capped at five messages a day.
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YouLearn AI is a study tool built around a single premise: instead of studying from someone else's content library, you upload your own course material and the product turns it into things you can study from. Feed it PDFs, slides, YouTube videos or recorded lectures, and it produces summaries, answers with references, quizzes, practice exams, flashcards, timelines, mind maps and lesson plans — plus an AI tutor you can question directly about the material, in text or voice.
The homepage frames the four capabilities as: summaries, quizzes and podcasts to grasp key points; uploading any content from PDFs and YouTube videos to slides and recorded lectures; personalized exams with answer breakdowns and progress tracking; and talking with an AI tutor to simplify ideas. The example materials on the site tell you who it is really aimed at — an MIT lecture on the human brain, a session on teaching CS50 with AI, a genetics topic on protein translation. This is built for university-level coursework, not for grade-school worksheets.
The company is YouLearn Inc., a Delaware corporation with a principal business address in San Francisco, and the site carries a "Backed by Y Combinator" badge. It self-reports more than two million learners, a figure that appears on both the homepage and the pricing page and which no independent source verifies. Six university logos sit under that claim on the pricing page; read them as an indication of where students come from, not as institutional procurement — the company makes no partnership claim about them.
The input side is the foundation. Beyond text documents, it takes YouTube links, slide decks and recorded lectures, and the file ceilings are large enough to matter: on Pro, individual files up to 2,000 pages or 300 MB; on Max, up to 5,000 pages or 500 MB. That is textbook and full-semester-lecture territory, not a handful of pages. The terms of service list "Document analysis and chat functionality" and "AI-powered video-lecture processing (chaptering, summarisation, flashcard generation)" among the company's proprietary systems.
The chat layer is what the terms call the "AI co-pilot," available in text and voice. The distinguishing detail the site emphasises is attribution: answers come "with references" back into your uploaded material, so you can check where a claim came from rather than trusting an unsourced paragraph. For studying, that difference matters more than fluency does.
Rather than stopping at comprehension aids, the product generates personalized exams, provides answer breakdowns and tracks progress over time. On Pro, quiz answers and exams are both unlimited — the company puts no meter on the self-testing loop, which is a meaningful signal about what it wants you to do with the tool.
The terms enumerate what the system generates: summaries, flashcards, quizzes, practice exams, timelines and mind maps, alongside lesson plans and podcasts. Podcast generation is metered as a real feature — 12 per day on Pro, unlimited on Max — turning reading material into something you can revise while commuting. Read-aloud is capped by characters per day rather than by item.
Most study tools say "powered by AI" and stop. This privacy policy names the providers that receive your content: Google LLC for Gemini models, Anthropic PBC for Claude models, OpenAI, LLC for GPT models, xAI Corp for Grok models, and ElevenLabs, Inc. for speech-to-text. It states plainly that when you use AI features, your prompts and relevant excerpts of uploaded content, images or audio are transmitted to these providers, which process the data under their own privacy policies. Whether you find that reassuring or alarming, the transparency itself is above the norm for this category.
Turning a recorded lecture into revisable material. Upload the recording, get chaptering and a summary, then generate a quiz from it rather than re-watching two hours at 1.5x speed.
Working through a dense PDF with a tutor beside you. Ask questions about a specific passage and get answers that point back into the document, which is the difference between studying and guessing.
Building a practice exam from your actual syllabus. Generate personalized exams from the material your course actually covers, with answer breakdowns showing where reasoning went wrong.
Auditing an open course. The site's own examples are public lectures, and the workflow suits self-directed learners working through material with no instructor to ask.
Revising away from a screen. Convert a topic into a podcast or use read-aloud for commuting or exercise review.
Coordinating a study group. The Teams plan adds shared spaces, centralized billing and per-member permissions, with a three-seat minimum.
University students working through dense course material — the clearest fit, and the audience the example content, file ceilings and student-discount verification are all built around.
Self-directed learners auditing open courses, who need something to ask questions of when there is no instructor available.
Anyone who learns better by testing than by reading, given that quizzes and practice exams are unmetered on paid plans.
Study groups and small cohorts that can justify the three-seat minimum for shared spaces and centralized billing.
Learners who revise on the move, using podcast generation and read-aloud instead of a screen.
It fits poorly for institutions with formal student-data compliance requirements — the legal documents never mention FERPA, discussed below — and for anyone handling regulated data, which the terms exclude outright. Younger students can use it under the terms, but only with parental permission and direct supervision.
YouLearn AI runs as a web application and as native apps on both iOS and Android, with download links on the homepage and pricing page. The web app lives on a subdomain: visiting the marketing site's pricing link redirects to app.youlearn.ai, and the interface language is selected automatically by region — checking from one location landed on the Chinese interface without any explicit choice. A language selector is available to override this.
The mobile apps are listed under the same identifier on both stores. On the App Store the listing is "YouLearn: AI Study Tutor" from YouLearn Inc., free to download, rated 4+. On Google Play the same app carries an "Everyone" content rating with in-app purchases and more than 50,000 downloads.
Worth flagging for parents: those store ratings mark the app as suitable for all ages to download, while the terms of service set a minimum age of 13 and require parental permission and direct supervision for minors. These are different kinds of judgement — store ratings assess content, terms assign contractual capacity — but the gap is one to know about.
The site is hosted in the United States, per the terms.
There are three published paid tiers plus a free tier that the pricing page does not show.
Free — documented only in the terms of service: 5 AI co-pilot messages per day and 3 content uploads per week. Real, but tightly capped.
Pro — $12/month billed yearly, marked Popular, with the yearly tab advertising 40% savings versus monthly. Includes unlimited uploads, pastes and recordings; unlimited AI chats; unlimited quiz answers; unlimited exams; 12 podcasts per day; 30 AI videos per month; 5 lesson plans per day; 200,000 read-aloud characters per day; and files up to 2,000 pages or 300 MB each.
Max — $45/month billed yearly. Everything in Pro plus extended premium chat limits, unlimited podcast generation, 60 AI videos per month, 50 lesson plans per day, unlimited read-aloud characters, files up to 5,000 pages or 500 MB, and priority support.
Teams — $9/month per seat billed yearly, minimum 3 seats. Everything in Pro plus discounts that scale with team size, centralized billing, member management with custom permissions, and shared spaces. Note that this figure varied by region during checking — an English render initially showed $15 per seat — so confirm on your own pricing page.
A student discount exists; the pricing FAQ has an entry for it and the privacy policy collects "academic status (for student discount verification)."
Refunds are worth reading before you subscribe. Web purchases include a 7-day free trial with full access; if you do not cancel before it ends, the subscription renews at the regular rate, and because full access was provided during the trial, no refund is issued once billing begins. Direct subscriptions without a trial get a 7-day money-back guarantee from first payment. All renewals are non-refundable. App Store purchases must be refunded through Apple. Team plans up to 199 seats use the same 7-day window; 200+ annual seats are handled case by case. Web refund requests go by email within 7 days of payment and process in 5–7 business days.
NotebookLM is the closest direct comparison — Google's tool works on your own uploaded sources with citations and audio overviews, and is free. It lacks the quiz and exam generation layer.
Quizlet and Anki own the flashcard and spaced-repetition space; Anki in particular is free, open and locally controlled, though you build the cards yourself.
StudyFetch and Knowt target the same "upload your material, get study tools" workflow with overlapping feature sets, and are the most direct competitors on positioning.
ChatPDF and similar single-purpose tools cover document chat alone if that is all you need.
Coconote and TLDL focus on the lecture-recording side specifically, if capturing and processing classes is your main problem rather than working with documents you already have.
For raw capability without the study scaffolding, uploading your PDF to ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini directly gets you a conversation about the document — you lose the quizzes, progress tracking and organised spaces, and you gain full control of the account relationship.
FERPA is never mentioned, and neither is COPPA. This is the most important thing to know about a product built for students. Searching the full text of both the privacy policy (38,000+ characters) and the terms of service (50,000+ characters) returns zero occurrences of FERPA, zero of COPPA, and zero of "student record" or "educational record." The terms do address other regulatory regimes — but only to exclude them, stating the site "is not tailored to comply with industry-specific regulations (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA), etc.)" and that users subject to such laws may not use it. Medical and financial regulation get named and disclaimed; the education-specific regime gets no mention at all. For an individual student this may not matter. For a department or institution evaluating it for coursework, the absence is the finding.
The privacy policy makes no encryption commitment. The word "encrypt" appears zero times in the entire policy. The security section says only that transmission "is at your own risk" and that you "should only access the Services within a secure environment." The sole written statement about encryption anywhere is Google Play's data safety panel noting "Data is encrypted in transit" — a store-level disclosure, not a policy commitment.
Google Play's data safety disclosure contradicts the privacy policy. The store panel states "No data shared with third parties." The privacy policy states that your prompts and uploaded content may be transmitted to five named third-party AI providers for processing. Both are official disclosures from the same company through different channels, and they cannot both be complete descriptions of the same practice. Presented side by side deliberately, without reconciliation.
There is no statement about whether your content trains models. Searching the policy for "train," "training our" and "machine learning model" returns zero occurrences each; the only appearance of "machine learning" is in the vendor category name "AI and machine learning providers." The company neither claims it trains on your uploads nor commits that it does not. That silence is reported here as silence — no disclaimer is invented on the vendor's behalf.
The company claims ownership of what the AI generates from your material. The terms state the entire site "including the AI co-pilot (text and voice), learning spaces, and all AI-generated materials (summaries, flashcards, quizzes, practice exams, timelines, mind-maps, etc.)" is owned or controlled by the company. You retain ownership of the PDFs, video links and recordings you upload, and grant a licence to process them — but the flashcard deck built from your textbook is, per the terms, theirs.
The Contribution License is expansive. Posting contributions grants the company "an unrestricted, unlimited, irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, royalty-free, fully-paid, worldwide right, and license to host, use, copy, reproduce, disclose, sell, resell, publish, broadcast, retitle, archive, store, cache, publicly perform, publicly display, reformat, translate, transmit, excerpt (in whole or in part), and distribute" them.
Minors can use it, but only under supervision on paper. The site is "intended for users who are at least 13 years of age," and minors "must have the permission of, and be directly supervised by, their parent or guardian," with a parent or guardian required to read and agree to the terms first. Meanwhile the privacy policy's minors clause addresses only under-13s. Whether the supervision requirement is enforced in any way is not described anywhere in the public materials.
The free tier is real but nearly invisible. Its existence and quotas appear only in the terms of service; the pricing page presents the 7-day trial as the entry path. A user who reads only the pricing page would reasonably conclude there is no free option.
Do-Not-Track signals are ignored. The policy states plainly that the company does "not currently respond to DNT browser signals or any other mechanism that automatically communicates your choice not to be tracked online."
Independent quality evidence is thin and inconsistent. The Trustpilot profile shows 3.5 from just 2 reviews, unclaimed, with no history of the company soliciting reviews — two reviews cannot characterise anything, so no quality conclusion is drawn from it here. That page also lists the company's location as Anguilla, which contradicts the Delaware-and-San-Francisco identity in the terms; Trustpilot's location field is often inferred, so the terms are treated as authoritative. App store ratings diverge from each other: 4.76 from 105 ratings on the App Store versus 4.2 from 512 reviews on Google Play, where the same page also shows 4.0 from 465 device-filtered reviews. The Android sample is roughly five times the iOS one. No coverage from established technology or education-technology press was found, so there is no independent editorial assessment of this product to cite.
The Y Combinator claim could not be independently confirmed as stated. The site displays "Backed by Y Combinator." The YC directory page reached for this product returned the profile of a different company, Hanji, whose founder's bio notes he "also founded YouLearn." That establishes the founder's history but not YouLearn's own batch or funding status, so the badge is reported here as a vendor claim rather than a verified fact.
Two different contact addresses for two different purposes. Privacy inquiries go to a general company address; refund requests go to what appears to be an individual's address at the same domain. Small, but worth knowing if a refund request goes unanswered.
There is a free tier, but you will not find it on the pricing page — it is documented in the terms of service, which state that free accounts are limited to 5 AI co-pilot messages per day and 3 content uploads per week. What the pricing page offers instead is a 7-day free trial with full access. Both are real; the free tier is genuinely usable for evaluating the tool on your own material, but not for carrying a semester.
PDFs, slides, YouTube videos and recorded lectures, among other content. Per-file limits are tier-dependent: up to 2,000 pages or 300 MB on Pro, and up to 5,000 pages or 500 MB on Max. Uploads themselves are unlimited on paid plans; on the free tier they are capped at three per week.
The privacy policy names five providers that receive user content: Google (Gemini models), Anthropic (Claude models), OpenAI (GPT models), xAI (Grok models) and ElevenLabs (speech-to-text). When you use AI features, your prompts and relevant excerpts of uploaded content, images or audio are transmitted to these providers, which process the data under their own privacy policies.
The privacy policy does not say. Searching the full text for "train," "training our" and "machine learning model" returns no occurrences — the company neither states that it trains on user content nor commits that it does not. If this matters to you, ask the company directly rather than assuming either answer, and note that your content is separately transmitted to five third-party providers whose own policies govern their handling of it.
The published legal documents do not address FERPA at all — the term appears nowhere in either the privacy policy or the terms of service, and neither does COPPA. The terms explicitly disclaim compliance with HIPAA and FISMA and bar users subject to those regimes, but say nothing about educational records regulation. Any institution with formal student-data requirements should treat this as unresolved and raise it with the company before adopting the tool.
The terms set the minimum at 13 and state that minors — generally anyone under 18 — must have the permission of, and be directly supervised by, a parent or guardian, who must also read and agree to the terms first. So under the terms, unsupervised use by a minor is not permitted. Note that the app stores rate the app 4+ and Everyone respectively, and the privacy policy's minors clause addresses only children under 13.
Pro is $12/month billed yearly, Max is $45/month billed yearly, and Teams is $9/month per seat with a three-seat minimum, though the Teams figure varied by region during checking. The yearly tab advertises 40% savings over monthly. A student discount is offered, with academic status collected for verification.
Within limits. Web purchases carry a 7-day money-back guarantee from first payment, requested by email within that window and processed in 5–7 business days. If you came through the 7-day free trial, no refund is issued once billing begins, because full access was provided during the trial. All renewals are non-refundable — cancelling before the next billing date is your responsibility. App Store purchases must be refunded by Apple; the company states it cannot issue those directly.
Not according to the terms. You retain ownership of the PDFs, video links and recordings you upload, and grant the company a licence to process them. But the terms list all AI-generated materials — summaries, flashcards, quizzes, practice exams, timelines and mind maps — as owned or controlled by the company. Treat generated study materials as something you access through the service rather than as your own portable asset.
YouLearn Inc., a Delaware corporation with a principal business address in San Francisco; the site is hosted in the United States. It self-reports more than two million learners on both its homepage and pricing page — a vendor figure with no independent verification. The site also displays a Y Combinator badge, which this check could not confirm independently: the YC directory page reached returned a different company's profile, whose founder's bio mentions having founded YouLearn.
