Designed by students, for students.

Hi. I'm Daniel. I built Lumen AI in my bedroom because almost every paid study app I tried felt like it was designed for students rather than byone. They're all great at something, but none of them were quite right for how I actually study.

So I took the best ideas from each, combined them into a single workspace, gamified the daily habit so it's fun to come back to, and built the study app I would've wanted to use myself. The goal: something students actually want to keep using.

The pitch is simple: every study tool you actually need — flashcards, quizzes, AI tutor, paper grading, podcast generation, notes — bundled into one workspace where they all share the same source material. Upload a chapter PDF and the chat panel cites it, the smart quiz pulls from it, the tutor reasons against it, the deck's back-of-card answers come from it. No more 17 tabs.

The part I'm most proud of is the leaderboards. They're scoped to your school. If you go to Brisbane Boys' College, your board is other BBC students. If you go to a school Lumen doesn't know about yet, you can type the name yourself and your board is everyone else who typed the same name. It just works.

The AI explanations are year-level aware too. Year 5 gets concrete examples and simple language. Postgrad gets formal vocabulary and abstract framing. Same source, two completely different reading experiences.

A few things that probably matter to you:

• Free during beta.No credit card. Eventually I'll need to charge a small amount to cover AI API costs, hosting, and the database — but the goal is to keep the core study features as cheap as possible. Nothing about Lumen is built to milk students.
• Your data is yours.Sources you upload are stored on the database I host. We send extracts of them to AI providers (Claude, OpenAI, Gemini) at request time so they can answer your questions, but we don't train on your data.
• It's open about the AI.Every AI answer is a draft you should verify against your source. The grader isn't a substitute for your teacher. The tutor isn't a substitute for thinking. I built this honestly.

Got feedback? Found a bug? Have an idea for a feature? Email me at [email protected]. I read everything.

— Daniel