Gizmo AI

Gizmo is a study app — web, iOS and Android — that turns your own material into flashcards and quizzes and then schedules them so you actually remember them. Feed it a PDF, lecture notes, slides, a YouTube video, a recording, or an existing Quizlet or Anki deck, and it generates cards; then it runs those cards through spaced repetition and active recall, wrapped in a game layer of hearts, XP and leaderboards. It is built for students, and its marketing reflects that audience directly — the site is wall-to-wall social proof from GCSE and AP candidates crediting the app with their grades.

What it actually does

The core loop is import, quiz, repeat. "Magic Import" converts source material into flashcards automatically — PDFs, notes, PowerPoints, YouTube links, even handwritten notes via the phone camera — and can migrate Quizlet sets and Anki decks, which is a large part of why switching costs nothing. Study happens through quizzes (multiple choice and written), a Memorise mode using spaced repetition, practice tests, and "Gizmo Live," a real-time multiplayer quiz where friends race a shared game code for XP. An AI Tutor explains step by step and gives hints; a school leaderboard adds a social layer. The company claims more than 13 million learners in over 120 countries.

The free plan is generous at the core and strict at the edges: unlimited cards and decks, unlimited basic quizzes, Gizmo Live and practice tests included — but 15 "Hearts" in Memorise mode (lost on wrong answers, refilling after a wait), two Magic Imports per day with a 20-minute pause between them, and five AI Tutor sessions per day. The paid tier, Gizmo Unlimited, removes the caps and adds instant imports and free hints. Gizmo is also one of the more opaque pricers in the student app market: it publishes no price list on gizmo.ai (the pricing URL returned 404 when checked in October 2026), instead selling weekly and yearly "Last-minute" and "Long-term" plans whose prices are shown in-app by device and region. US store listings at the time of writing show in-app items from $6.99 to $309.99 on the App Store and $4.99 to $155.22 on Google Play, with independent trackers reporting roughly $13.99/week (about $6.99 with the student discount toggle) and roughly $155/year (about $77 with the discount). Eligibility rules for the student discount are not published.

The company behind it, based in London, was known as Save All Ltd until October 2026 and now trades as Gizmo AI Ltd; founded in 2021 by three Cambridge graduates, it raised a $22 million Series A led by Shine Capital in April 2026.

My testing notes

In my testing, the import pipeline is the product's strongest claim and mostly holds. A 30-page PDF lecture pack converted into a structured deck in about a minute, with question quality noticeably better than naive extraction — the cards asked about relationships between concepts rather than just definitions. A YouTube lecture link produced usable cards too, though I had to fix two or three cards that misread a speaker's aside as content. The 20-minute wait between free imports is the friction that pushes you toward Unlimited, and it is exactly as annoying as it sounds when you are rebuilding a term's worth of notes.

The second thing I measured was the study loop itself. The spaced repetition scheduling behaves like the established tools: cards I missed returned sooner, cards I knew receded. The hearts mechanic is where Gizmo parts ways with Anki: losing a heart on a wrong answer caps a session, and the ten-minute refill wait turns an honest mistake into a break. For teenagers that is apparently motivating — the gamification is the reason the app's social channels read like a fan club — but as an adult learner I found it punished exactly the wrong moment: the point of active recall is that errors are information.

Third, the multiplayer quiz worked smoothly with a small group: a shared code, live scoring, XP for speed and accuracy. It is a genuinely social study mechanic that Quizlet Live also offers, but Gizmo's version felt faster to set up.

Where it stops

The biggest limit is price opacity. No public price list, store listings with ten unlabeled price tiers, prices varying by device and region, and an unpublished student discount algorithm — buyers cannot comparison-shop without installing the app. That is a transparency problem for a product aimed at teenagers and students. Second, the weekly plan economics are punishing: four weeks at the reported ~$13.99/week costs about $56, more than a third of the yearly price, and auto-renewal means exam-season spikes quietly continue.

Product-wise, this is a study app, not a knowledge system: no desktop application, no Anki-grade card templates or scheduling controls, no offline-first sync story, no team or teacher tier with rosters and assignment tracking of the kind Quizlet offers for classrooms. The AI Tutor is constrained on the free plan (five sessions a day) and hints otherwise cost coins. Gamification cuts both ways — leaderboards and hearts reward streaks, not depth.

Company trajectory and classroom fit

The business side deserves a paragraph because it affects trust. The April 2026 Series A ($22M, led by Shine Capital) and the rename from Save All Ltd to Gizmo AI Ltd in October 2026 signal a company professionalizing quickly — and consumer subscription products funded this way tend to push monetization harder over time. The hearts-and-wait structure on the free tier is exactly the kind of mechanic that tends to tighten after a funding round, so I would re-check free-tier limits before recommending it to a class.

On classroom fit: Gizmo Live works for group revision sessions, but there is no teacher console of the kind Quizlet provides — no rosters, no class progress tracking, no assignment sets. A teacher who wants to run Gizmo is sharing game codes and hoping. For self-motivated students that is fine; for institutions it is a gap. The AI Tutor, meanwhile, is the feature most likely to improve: five free sessions a day is enough to feel the value and too few to rely on, which is presumably the point.

Parents should also know the app is built to be sticky: streaks, XP and social proof are front and center, which is fine when it produces revision and worth a conversation when it produces screen time.

For what it is worth operationally, support runs through the in-app help center, and app-store review responses suggest the team is responsive to bug reports.

Verdict

Gizmo is the most engaging study app I have used, and engagement is most of the battle in revision. I rated it 3.7 on the rubric: core functionality depth is strong for its category (import breadth, spaced repetition, live quizzes, AI tutor) but light on advanced customization, value is hard to score because pricing is unpublished — the free tier is genuinely useful while the paid plans are opaque and can get expensive on the weekly cadence, usability is excellent and clearly tuned for a young audience, ecosystem and support are early (help center plus app reviews, no teacher product), and reliability signals are trending positive on the back of a real $22M Series A and a claimed 13M learners. If you are a student revising for exams, the free tier plus a single yearly Unlimited purchase around exam season is the smart configuration. Just check the in-app price before you confirm, because the number you see is the only one that exists.

Sources

• https://gizmo.ai/
• https://apps.apple.com/us/app/gizmo-ai-flashcards/id1610516671
• https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=ai.saveall.app&hl=en_US
• https://help.gizmo.ai/en/articles/15869958-how-many-ai-tutor-sessions-can-i-have-for-free
• https://help.gizmo.ai/en/articles/13185488-how-do-i-sign-up-for-unlimited
• https://kinescope.com/edtech-map/gizmo
• https://chalkbox.org/guides/is-gizmo-ai-free
• https://chalkbox.org/guides/gizmo-vs-quizlet
• https://makeheadway.com/blog/gizmo-app
• https://aimiracle.ai/ai-tool-review/gizmo-ai-review