What revision websites cost in 2026 (every tier compared)

There is no single answer to what a revision site costs, which is exactly what makes the question so irritating to ask. Almost every tool here has two or three tiers and two or three billing periods, and the figure it advertises is nearly always the annual price divided by twelve. So this is the whole UK market in one table, with the tier and the billing basis named every time.

I checked every price below on the vendor’s own page on 8 September 2026, logging in where a price is only visible behind an account. Where a tool advertises a monthly rate but charges for a year up front, both figures are here: what it works out at per month, and what actually leaves the account. School licences sit in a separate table further down, because a per-pupil school price and a consumer subscription are not the same kind of number. Nothing here is copied from another roundup, which is how stale figures spread.

The short version: most of what a GCSE or A-level student actually needs is free, and the paid tools cluster between £4 and £12 a month if you commit to a year. Month to month, the same tools cost two to three times that.

The short answer: what you have to pay for

Three of the most-used revision resources in the country cost nothing and are not crippled versions of a paid product. BBC Bitesize is free with no account across every subject. Physics & Maths Tutor gives away past papers, mark schemes, topic notes and solution banks. And Seneca’s core courses are free and unlimited, with the paid tiers sitting on top rather than gating the basics. A student who used only those three would not be badly served.

What you pay for is narrower than the marketing suggests. In practice it is one of four things, and everything on the price table below is some combination of them.

• A large library of examiner-written notes and past papers with mark schemes in one place (Save My Exams).
• AI marking of your written answers (Save My Exams SmartMark).
• An AI tutor that will explain and generate material on demand (Aicademy).
• An unlimited question bank where the free version is metered (Cognito).

The outlier is Anki, which is free on desktop, web and Android and a £24.99 one-off purchase on iOS. Over a two-year GCSE course that is cheaper than every subscription here, and roundups usually write it up as a “paid iOS app” without ever printing the number.

The full price table

The first thing to notice is the gap between billing periods. Seneca Supreme is £19.99 month to month and £6.99 billed annually, nearly three times, and almost every paid tool on the table is priced that way. Which means the only fair comparison is annual against annual, and on that basis what counts as cheapest depends on what you are buying. Quizlet Plus is the lowest number here at £2.99 a month, but that buys flashcards; for notes and past papers it is Save My Exams Essential at £4.

The billing traps

None of these are scams. They are standard subscription practice, disclosed somewhere in the terms, and easy to walk into anyway.

• The advertised price is almost always the annual one. “Seneca from £6.99” and “Save My Exams from £4” are both true and both annual. Month to month those are £19.99 and £12.
• Savings are anchored to the most expensive plan. Save My Exams badges its annual plans “Save 68%”, measured against the one-month price and not the three-month one.
• Free trials can exclude monthly billing. Quizlet’s monthly plan is not eligible for a free trial at all, so the only way to take the seven-day trial is to start on an annual plan. Save My Exams’ trial appears only on Premium annual, and its terms allow one free trial per person ever.
• “Unlimited” tiers can be metered. Quizlet Plus includes three practice tests and twenty rounds of Learn a month. The unlimited one is the tier above.
• Some pricing scales with your child’s year group. Tassomai runs £8.99 a month for Years 3 to 6, £29.99 for Years 7 and 8, and £44.99 for Years 9 to 11, and it emails you when you move up a band.
• The free tier may cost you attention instead. ChatGPT’s free plan and its £7 Go tier are both ad supported as of September 2026. Ads stop at £20.

Credit where it is due, because the same terms cut both ways. Save My Exams gives 30 days’ notice of a price change affecting a renewal, sends a reminder before auto-renewal, honours the 14-day cooling-off period, and lets you keep access to the end of a plan you cancel. Tassomai’s subscription ends automatically on the date of the child’s last GCSE exam, which is the most consumer-friendly term on this page.

What each free tier gives you

“Free tier” covers everything from a complete product to a screenshot of one, and most of the people describing them are selling something.

BBC Bitesize and Physics & Maths Tutor are just free. No account, no cap, no upgrade prompt. Bitesize covers every subject at KS3, GCSE and Nationals with notes, videos and quizzes. PMT is the better of the two for exam practice: past papers and mark schemes by board, plus topic questions and solution banks, and it is the single most useful free thing on this list for the sciences and maths. It also sells printed resources, revision courses and tutoring, but none of that gates the part of the site you came for.

Seneca’s free tier is excellent. The core courses, mapped to your exam board, with its recall-first question style, are the main product and not a trial. The paid tiers add premium courses and e-books (Supreme), unlimited cram and open-ended exam questions (Exam Boost), and the Amelia AI assistant on top. If your reason for paying is Amelia, note that it is Seneca’s most expensive tier at £39.99 a month rolling.

Save My Exams has a real free plan. How big it is, I could not establish. Its comparison page lists sample notes on selected topics, a limited selection of topic questions, short model answers, a small range of past papers, and “one or two subjects” unlocked, with SmartMark, Target Tests and Mock Exams on Premium only. What is missing from every one of those rows is a number: no view count, no monthly cap, no named subjects. So the honest answer to “is Save My Exams free” is yes, and you will not know how much of it you get until you hit the wall.

Quizlet’s free tier still does flashcards, which is the thing most people want it for. The paid tiers are where the naming gets confusing: Quizlet Plus is now the cheapest paid tier and it is metered, with three practice tests and twenty rounds of Learn questions a month. Unlimited Learn rounds and full practice-test access are on Plus Unlimited, one tier up.

ChatGPT’s free tier now carries ads, and so does the new £7 Go tier. Ads only disappear at £20 Plus, which matters because the free tier is where almost every student is.

Cognito and Medly both have a real free way in. Cognito’s free plan keeps the science videos and caps the question practice. Medly is free to start and does not ask for a card. StudyFetch gives you two each of study sets, uploads, quizzes, practice tests, flashcard sets, articles and audio recaps, plus 20 chat messages.

Aicademy’s lessons are free to read with no account. They are written to the exam board specifications, and they are the product rather than a preview of one. What is metered is the AI: a free account adds 10 creations a month, spent on a learning path, lesson, quiz, flashcard deck or document upload, plus 10 tutor messages a day. Studying what you have made is never capped.

Tassomai and GCSEPod do not really have free tiers at all. Tassomai gives parents a seven-day trial and then bills; GCSEPod is sold to schools only, so whether you have it is decided by your school and there is no route for a parent to buy it. If your school has it, it is free to you. If it does not, no amount of money will get it. I cover the workarounds in the best GCSEPod alternatives.

What schools pay, and why it looks nothing alike

Two of the tools here are bought institutionally, and the per-student numbers are so different from consumer pricing that quoting one for the other is meaningless.

The comparison worth making is Tassomai’s. A school pays up to £5 per student a year for two core subjects. A parent buying the same product privately for a Year 9 to 11 child pays £44.99 a month, which is the most expensive consumer price in this entire article. Same software, roughly a hundredfold difference. That is not a scandal, it is how institutional software has always been priced, but it does mean a parent’s first move should be asking the school what it already has a licence for.

Where paying is worth it, and where it isn’t

Sort this by the gap you are trying to fill rather than by the tool.

If you want past papers and examiner-written notes in one place, pay Save My Exams. At £4 a month on annual billing, Essential is the best value on this page for that job. Premium at £8 a month on the same annual basis, or £25 rolling, adds SmartMark, Mock Exams and the strengths tracker, and whether it is worth double depends entirely on whether you will actually sit the mocks. If you will not pay at all, Physics & Maths Tutor covers most of the same ground for free.

If you want interactive courses, do not pay anyone. Seneca’s free tier already does this well enough that paying for Supreme is a marginal upgrade for most students. The one paid tier with a clear reason behind it is Amelia, and at £39.99 a month rolling it is worth checking what else that budget buys first. We list the options in Seneca alternatives.

If you want flashcards, pay once or not at all. Anki on desktop and Android is free and has the strongest scheduling algorithm of anything here; £24.99 once on iOS beats £35.99 a year for Quizlet Plus over any realistic course length. Quizlet earns its money on ease and the size of its shared library, not on the memory engine. See the best Quizlet alternatives.

If you want the material built around you rather than written for everyone, that is where we come in. Enter a topic, or upload your own notes, and Aicademy builds a learning path for it: lessons and quizzes planned in one pass, so each step builds on the last, with spaced-repetition flashcards and a tutor that knows what you are looking at. No catalogue can do that, because a catalogue only contains what someone already wrote. The lesson library is free to read without an account, and a free account adds 10 creations a month and 10 tutor messages a day. Pro is for more serious revision at £9.99 a month, or £5.00 billed annually: unlimited creations and tutor messages, plus AI notes, PDF exports and progress analytics.

For a fuller look at what each of these tools is actually like to use rather than what it costs, see the best free GCSE revision apps and the best A-level revision apps.

Aicademy is mine, and it sits in a table I wrote. It is listed on exactly the same terms as everything else, and every source is linked so you can check the lot yourself in about five minutes. If a number here is wrong, that is a mistake rather than a strategy, and I would like to hear about it.