Frequently Asked Questions

It's free forever, no account required to try it. You get all four blocks and unlimited builds — it's not a time-limited or feature-limited trial.

Fine-Tune ($3.99/mo or $29.99/yr) adds the color-shading fine-tune mechanic, a before/after output comparison, and every future concept module as it ships. Pro ($9.99/mo or $99.99/yr) adds Richard — a chat assistant trained exclusively on YDABlocks, not a general-purpose chatbot — with 150 Richard conversations a month, running more than one Build at once, and subject packs (Math, Science, SAT/ACT vocab). Family ($12.99/mo or $129.99/yr) gives every kid in the house their own Build with 5,000 Richard conversations a month shared across the family.

Richard stops answering and says so plainly — you'll never be left guessing whether it's a limit or a gap in your Build. Everything else keeps working exactly as before, and your training pairs are unaffected. Pro and Family conversations reset monthly; school and district conversations are counted per student across the school year, and the allowance is set high enough that ordinary use never reaches it. Safety escalations always bypass the cap, on every tier including free, so anyone in genuine distress still gets a support response.

It's per-student, billed annually, and sales-led rather than self-serve, so we don't publish flat numbers. Small School (under about 500 students) includes an admin dashboard, school-wide completion view, and metered Richard. District Standard adds one subject band with Richard included. District Premium includes the full subject library, unlimited Richard, custom branding, and priority support. Talk to us for a quote built around your enrollment.

Blue reads — it turns words into positions on a map, where things that mean similar things sit close together. Green looks around — it figures out which words relate to which other words, and blends them together based on how strongly they relate. Yellow thinks — it takes the blended idea from Green and refines it using a fixed rule, the same rule every time, for every word. Red answers — it lines up every possible answer and gives each one a confidence score, and the most confident answer wins, but it's never the only option considered. The order is fixed — Blue, Green, Yellow, Red — even if you rename or recolor the blocks.

Fine-tuning adjusts the blend weight between the Green (Look Around) and Yellow (Think) blocks only — it never touches Blue or Red. The paid-tier journey is Builder → Training Pairs → Fine-Tune → Product.

Richard is a warm, safety-first chat assistant trained exclusively on YDABlocks — not a general-purpose chatbot with YDABlocks bolted on. His purpose is to support the learning experience and keep it safe; being able to ask him about everyday subjects is a welcome side effect, not the point of the product.

Certain words and phrases trip a safety net. When that happens the chat sets the lesson aside and responds with support and the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline instead of a normal answer — on every tier including free, and it never counts against any conversation limit. Who gets told depends on who's chatting: for a student in a classroom, their teacher is notified quietly in the background; for a family child, the parent is. The person chatting is never told an adult was contacted.

The safety net doesn't check whose account it is — you'd get the same support response a student would. But a solo adult account has no teacher and no parent wired into it, so by default nobody is told. If you want someone told, Settings lets you name one person we'll email if it ever happens. It's optional, blank by default, and you can change or clear it any time. We'll never send them what you typed — only that it happened and that you'd asked us to reach out. We're not a crisis service, and this is the whole of what we offer: one field, your choice.

A colorblind-safe palette, a full grayscale/monochrome mode with a diagonal-stripe pattern overlay, four font-size scales, a dedicated dyslexia-friendly reading font (Lexend), a high-contrast mode, WCAG-compliant extra text spacing, per-block audio tones, a reduce-motion mode that starts the Builder paused instead of auto-playing, and custom block labels in any language you type.

You can relabel any block in any language you type. A fully translated interface beyond English is planned but marked "Coming soon" — it isn't live yet.

For school use, consent comes from the school under COPPA's school-consent provision, and YDABlocks acts as a FERPA "School Official." For family use, a parent or guardian consents directly and can review, correct, export, or delete their child's data at any time.

For schools and districts: at the end of each school year, data is compressed and cryptographically hashed, retained for 3 years, then permanently destroyed — a school can request earlier deletion at any time. If a contract ends, data is deleted or returned within 30–45 days per the agreement (minus any already-active 3-year hashed window). For families: deleting an account permanently deletes the data within one week, and it's exportable before that.

No. Data is never sold and never used for ad targeting, and there's no profiling beyond the authorized educational experience.

Ordinary chat is private, and that's enforced by the system itself rather than by hiding it in the interface. Safety flags are the exception — when something looks serious, an adult has to be able to help. Beyond that, what a school can see is part of the agreement that school signs with us. If you're a parent and you want to know what your child's school chose, ask the school, or ask us and we'll tell you.

Yes — YDABlocks is an LTI 1.3 tool provider and can be added to any LTI 1.3-compatible LMS, including Canvas and Schoology.

OneRoster, Clever, and ClassLink are all supported today. Google Classroom rostering isn't integrated yet.

Not yet — today YDABlocks is a responsive web app that works well in any mobile browser. Dedicated iOS and Android apps are in development.