Building Ailumno: an AI study companion for university students
Ten study tools in one subscription, on every screen a student owns. What the product had to do, and the decisions that shaped it.
The stack a student is already paying for
A university student running a normal semester is usually running a small pile of software: something to record lectures, something to summarise a PDF, a flashcard app, a calendar, a notes app, a spreadsheet tracking grades, and a timer. Most of it is subscribed separately, none of it knows about the rest, and the student is the integration layer.
Ailumno exists to collapse that. Ten tools under one subscription, sharing one store of the student's own material: an AI agent, audio and image to text, document summarisation, auto-generated quizzes, digital notebooks, an academic calendar, a grade tracker, task management, a study timer, and career news filtered by degree.
An AI that knows the syllabus, not the internet
The agent at the center of the product, Smarty, is trained on the material the student uploads: their lecture recordings, their PDFs, their photographed whiteboards. That constraint is the whole point. A general-purpose chatbot answers confidently about a course it has never seen; an agent grounded in the student's own documents answers about the exam they are actually sitting.
It also makes the other tools compound rather than sit side by side. A lecture transcribed on Tuesday and a whiteboard photographed on Thursday become material the summariser and the quiz generator draw from, which is the difference between ten features and one product. The quizzes take an adjustable difficulty, so the same source can be used to check recall early in a term and to stress-test it the week before an exam.
Designed for whichever device is in the bag
Students do not study on one screen. A lecture is captured on a phone, notes are written on a tablet, and the revision happens on a laptop at a desk. So the interface had to be genuinely responsive across iPad, Android tablets, desktop and phone — not a desktop layout compressed until it fits.
Stylus support was its own problem. Handwriting in the digital notebooks is a different interaction model from typing: it needs the pen to feel immediate, the palm to be ignored, and pages to organize themselves by semester rather than piling into one long document. Getting that right is what makes a tablet a notebook instead of a screen you can draw on.
Spanish first, and priced to be kept
The product is built Spanish-first with an English toggle, for Latin American university students. That is a design decision as much as a translation one: Spanish runs longer than English, so buttons, quiz options and summary cards all have to hold copy that expands, and dates and grading conventions follow the reader rather than the developer.
The pricing follows the same logic. A seven-day trial with no card, then three dollars a month or thirty a year. At that price the product has to be cheap to run and genuinely replace the pile of subscriptions it is competing with — which puts real pressure on scope. Every tool in the set had to earn its place against the cost of the whole thing being one line on a student's bank statement.
What building our own product does for client work
Client software gets handed over. Our own does not — we keep running it, which means we live with the decisions long after the point where an agency would have invoiced and moved on. The parts that age badly, the assumptions that do not survive real use, and the maintenance costs of a shortcut all land on us.
That is the argument for the web and tech development work we take on: it is built by a team that maintains software rather than one that only ships it. The same standard applies either way — scoped in phases, delivered working at each milestone, with documented source handed over so your team can carry it.
Full-time teams in Chile and India, about nine hours apart. Chile covers your working day; India picks the file up as you sign off, so weekday work does not wait overnight.
Tier 3 is the top of our creative scale — and the only tier we run. The thinking behind this article is the same thinking behind every brief we take on.