Frequently Asked Questions

It's free forever, no account required to try it. You get all four blocks, in full, and one Build you keep — it's not a time-limited or feature-limited trial. Upgrading is what lets you run more than one Build at a time.

Fine-Tune adds fine-tuning itself — setting how much your build leans on the pairs you taught it versus what it works out on its own — plus a before/after output comparison, every future concept module as it ships, and Richard — your YDABlocks partner, trained exclusively on YDABlocks — with 50 conversations a month. Pro adds a much higher Richard cap (300 conversations a month), running more than one Build at once, all 26 subject packs (Math, Science, ELA, Reading Comprehension, Phonics, Phonics — Remedial, Writing, Social Studies, Spelling, Coding, Financial Literacy, Arts, SAT/ACT Vocabulary, and 13 full languages — 5,100+ practice items total), and Blockswork, a gamified practice mode with streaks, badges, and leaderboards. Family covers up to 7 people in your household — adults or kids, any mix — each with their own Build with 5,000 Richard conversations a month and the same subject packs and Blockswork 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 attached to your account, not to a code, so it applies automatically the moment you subscribe — including to anything we release later. It lasts as long as your subscription does. Cancelling ends it, because cancelling is a decision; a card expiring isn't, so if a payment fails we hold the discount open for two weeks while you sort it out. Your comped pilot access is a separate thing and runs for the window you were told about when your account was set up.

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 your YDABlocks partner — a warm, safety-first chat 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. He is not a tutor: tutoring on YDABlocks means a real, credential-cleared person you book through Blockswork Connect.

Richard can get things wrong. He's an AI, and AIs state wrong answers with the same confidence as right ones — so check anything that matters, especially facts, dates, and numbers. He's here to help you understand your build and the four blocks; he is not a source of truth, and he isn't a substitute for your teacher, your textbook, or an adult you trust. The one thing he is deliberately careful about is safety: if a conversation turns serious, he stops helping with the lesson and responds with support instead.

Certain words and phrases trip a safety net — self-harm, or a threat to someone's life. 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. Everyone who could act is told at once, not in sequence: in a school that means every teacher and administrator at that school and the district's administrators; for a family child it means the parent. They all see the same alert, and clearing it requires re-authenticating and typing a confirmation, which is recorded permanently under that person's name. During a school's long break, when staff inboxes aren't being read, it goes to the guardians on file instead — with the district's administrators still included — and switches back automatically when term starts. Nobody is ever told what was actually said — only that something was flagged and to check in. 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 palette for each type of colourblindness rather than one compromise across all of them — deuteranopia, protanopia and tritanopia each move only the pair that condition actually confuses — plus a full greyscale mode for achromatopsia 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.

Yes — the Android app is on Google Play, free, with the whole Builder in it. Search for YDABlocks or go to play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.ydablocks.app. The iPhone version is coming soon. The web app works well in any mobile browser in the meantime, and your account and builds are the same on all of them — sign in on one and everything is there on the other.