Today, Anki’s creator Damien Elmes announced that Anki’s stewardship would be changing over to the team behind AnkiHub.

For those unfamiliar, Ankihub is an Anki addon that allows for collaborative deck creation, mostly known for their shared medical USMLE decks.

my Ankihub subscribed decks

Below are some AnkiHub statistics:

  • The 5x Growth Gap: The flagship medical deck (AnKing Step Deck) currently has over 154,000 subscribers. To put that in perspective, the most popular pre-medical deck (MCAT) has roughly 29,000, meaning there are 5x more active medical students than pre-meds using AnkiHub.

  • Top 10 Dominance: Of the top 10 most-subscribed decks on AnkiHub, 90% are medical-specific (USMLE, MCAT, Anatomy, EKG, and Dermatology).

  • The AnKing Monopoly: The main medical deck (AnKing Step Deck) accounts for more subscribers than almost all other niche decks on the platform combined.

Overall, I’m not too sure I’m a fan of the new direction the owner’s will take Anki in. My impression of Ankihub is that it’s a decent resource for those interested in completing the USMLE, and basically all of their revenue comes from selling this resource to medical students:

Ankihub’s current pricing, with lifetime pricing at $450 USD.

I don’t think Ankihub’s pricing is worth it for collaborative decks, and I especially do not like the upsell for ‘AI-powered’ features. I joined as a beta-tester and didn’t like their integrations when I tried them, however they are likely more polished/refined now.

Ankihub has committed to upholding Anki’s principles (open-source, genuinely useful, user customisability), however only time will tell how well this holds up.

snippet from Ankihub’s statement

Thankfully, Anki is open-source so other maintainers can fork the project and take over should anything change. I’m mostly concerned about iOS mobile development, which is closed source and currently developed by Damien (unlike desktop and Ankidroid which have other contributors).

Otherwise I’m pretty excited for the design improvements and extra development power behind Anki though, hopefully the new ownership will be a boon for memory systems in general!

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