StudyArena: an AI app that pays students to do homework; what it really sells is student votes
What it is A homework version of LMArena: for each question, three anonymous AIs answer at once. You vote for the clearest one, and only after voting does it reveal which model wrote which answer.
Why it took off It pays students: school-email sign-up cashback, up to $100 a month for "learn and earn", and campus bounties pulled in a large wave of students who want money. The subsidy is recouped by turning the votes into a "which model does homework best" leaderboard and selling that to AI model companies.
CHow you could follow it Don't copy a student AI comparison app outright. A team with a data buyer lined up could pick a vertical (homework in a local language, licensing exam questions, a specific programming framework), sign the buyer before opening the subsidies, and borrow StudyArena's tactics for acquisition: local-currency rewards, local payment methods, and per-task bounties.
- Data (updated daily) · first launch 2026-08-28 · 11-07 installs 61,548
Android · Total installs worldwide Data 2026-10-29 → 2026-11-07 (10 days, 10 observations). Google's detail page only refreshes install counts every other day, so a flat day doesn't mean nobody installed.
StudyArena has a single anonymous large model answer a homework question, with three answers shown side by side. Students vote, and only then is it revealed which model answered. Two months after launch it has had 60k+ installs on Google Play, and its growth is coming not from the US but from Nigeria and the Philippines. The reason is simple: it pays students real money, up to $100 a month. The math works because the students' votes are the thing it is selling.
A part-time job: "replace ChatGPT with StudyArena"
On 2026 Aug 17, Mercer University's career center in Georgia, US, posted a job called "StudyArena Instead of GPT": use StudyArena instead of ChatGPT for coursework within a few weeks, paid $20 to $100 a month. Ten days later, on Aug 28, StudyArena's Android version went live.
A while later, the same copy-paste posts started showing up on India's Reddit cashback sub r/IndiaReferral: "[StudyArena] ₹500 reward for students with college/school email." One post read: "I signed up with the invite link, verified my school email, and my account now shows ₹500, withdrawal pending." Another broke it down: ₹250 for verifying a school email, ₹250 more for the invite link, PayPal arrives in one business day. Soon someone in the same sub asked: "Has anyone actually got it to UPI?"
What it is
You ask a question in the app and three answers appear side by side, with the model names hidden. You vote for the one that makes the most sense, and only then do the names of the three models show. You can keep asking follow-ups. The store listing says "You judge the reasoning, not the logo." In plain terms, it's LMArena (the blind-test site people use to rank models) built for homework.
It's made by A1Base, a YC W25 company, listed on Play under A1Zaps. Founder Pasha Rayan co-founded Forage, which was also YC-backed. Forage reached 10M+ users and worked with 5000 universities. CTO Pennie Li was Forage's employee #3. So this team has already run campus distribution once.
How big the numbers are
| Metric | Sources | |
|---|---|---|
| Google Play installs | 9-28 ~1,000 → 10-12 ~14k → 10-21 ~32k → 11-05 61,548 | Google Play installs (third-party estimate) |
| past 7 days | +19,900 | Same as above, 11-06 |
| Charts | Nigeria Education Top Free #42–52, Philippines #150–190; also charted in Kenya (best #24), Pakistan, and Uganda | Google Play charts, AppWinners |
| US store | No overall chart placement | Same as above |
| iOS | On the App Store since 9-02, 0 ratings in the US store | App Store |
| Rating | 4.3 stars on tablet, 14 reviews | Google Play |
Almost no volume in September. It took off around Oct 7, with two single-day jumps of several thousand on 10-12 and 10-21, then settled at two to three thousand a day. 60k installs but only 14 reviews suggests many people installed and didn't use it much (inference).
Where users come from: almost all of them were paid to show up
- Signup cashback: cash for registering with a school email, ₹250–500 in India. The official student page says "School-email cash rewards may be available depending on their country."
- "Earn while you learn": studyarena.com/earn is titled "Earn money on every question you ask," up to $100 a month, counted by approved questions. Payouts are converted to local currency and paid out the local way: £80 in the UK, €90 in Ireland, R$500 in Brazil, Rp1.5M in Indonesia, ₱5,000 in the Philippines (GCash top-up or mobile load), ₹8,000 in India (UPI cash or mobile recharge). The page even does the math for you: ChatGPT Plus costs about ₱1,200 a month in the Philippines and about ₹1,999 in India, "here the money flows the other way."
- Campus bounties: /jobs/bounties lists 16 per-task gigs, paid out via Zelle, Venmo, or PayPal once approved. Stuffing flyers into 150 dorm doors pays $55; scanning 400 rooms pays $130; putting up 200 posters pays $180; a two-hour table in a busy spot pays $80; sending the link to a class chat of 50+ people pays $10; a finals-week study-with-me TikTok pays $20; getting a professor or TA to demo it in class pays $250.
- Ambassadors and creators: campus ambassadors are recruited remotely worldwide on Wellfound, and the site advertises paid student creators for TikTok and Reels. Creator codes like STUDYTEA and ALEXGI are circulating outside. But searching "studyarena" on TikTok turns up no videos with real reach.
- SEO: the site has a set of /vs comparison pages (against Poe, Perplexity, Arena, Quizlet), plus a blog and an open-source awesome-study-tools directory. The founder posted "I built a free tool to compare different AI tools for studying" on r/studytips.
- Ads: nothing found in the Meta or Google ad libraries. Which reward or campaign caused the jumps on 10-12 and 10-21 can't be seen from outside, and this is unverified.
The bounty board is the US-campus playbook. But the installs that actually pushed the numbers up came from Nigeria, the Philippines, Kenya, and Pakistan, markets most sensitive to "install the app, earn money." Nigeria and Kenya have no dedicated local-currency page, so that volume most likely spread through earn-money links passed along WhatsApp and Telegram groups (inference, unverified).
Where the money comes from: students are the suppliers, model companies are the customers
The earn page has a section called "Why we can afford this (and ChatGPT can't)," which lays out the math:
AI labs buy the scoreboard, not your homework.
Model companies pay for aggregated leaderboards: which model wins on which kinds of student homework, based on anonymized votes. Other revenue lines include school-by-grade leaderboard pilots, future student-targeted sponsorships (internships, software discounts), and a $20/month Supporter membership.
So the money paid to students isn't a user-acquisition cost. It's data-procurement cost. Every "real question + three answers + one human vote" is a labeled, subject-tagged human preference data point. LMArena has already shown this data is valuable, raising $2025M in seed funding in 100. StudyArena's school-email requirement, its "real study questions only" rule, and its anti-cheating review all protect data quality. Whether any model company has actually paid, and how much, is not public.
Who it's competing with
| Competitors | Scale | How it differs from StudyArena |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena / Arena | The de facto standard for LLM evaluation, raised $2025M in 100 | Also blind voting, but open to everyone on all tasks, no official app, and voters aren't paid |
| Gauth | 135M installs on Play, +7M in the last 4.91 days | Snap a photo for one answer, ByteDance-linked, heavy paid acquisition |
| Poe | Play 11.5M installs | Users pick the models themselves, no blind testing, subscription revenue |
| Brainly / Question.AI / Knowunity | Several million to 300M installs | One-answer homework helper or community |
| ChatGPT / Gemini study modes | Huge | Gemini gives students free premium access, the strongest substitute |
| Storra (Nigeria) | Team of 4 | Local "answer questions for cash" apps, no AI comparison |
The "three models, blind vote" format has been LMArena's for two years, so it's not new. StudyArena's novelty is in two places only: it focuses solely on student homework, and it pays the people who use it.
If it were you
C: This playbook can be copied, but copying it this way doesn't pay. The other side of this business is data procurement from model companies, which takes connections, funding, and the ability to front cash for users. A YC team can spend money first and find buyers later. If an indie developer follows, they're paying subsidies to freeloaders out of their own pocket. Anyone can copy the product shape. What they're copying is only the cost half.
Who it suits: teams already in data buying or annotation, such as companies doing RLHF data or evaluation outsourcing, looking for a human preference source cheaper than crowdsourcing platforms with cleaner user profiles. Also builders of "earn money with tasks" apps in India, the Philippines, or Nigeria can use its pricing and bounty tables as a reference.
Who it doesn't suit: anyone without a data buyer who expects subscriptions to pay back costs. Running three models on each question costs three times a normal AI homework app. Most users come for the cashback, not the membership, and the $20/month Supporter tier is hard to sell in these countries.
How to do it: the most realistic move is to pick a vertical. Choose an area where model companies lack real data and it's clear who the experts are: homework in a local language (Hindi, Tagalog, Yoruba), nursing or law exam questions, or error messages from a specific programming framework. Only let people who can verify identity (school email, license number) vote, sign one or two evaluation or data companies on per-item pricing first, and only then add subsidies.
How to acquire users: copy the specific moves. Write rewards in local currency per country and route them through local channels like GCash, UPI, and mobile load; build landing pages per country; split growth tasks into per-piece bounties (send the link to a group $10, a class demo $40); use a school email as the gate to keep freeloaders out.
When to move: model companies are willing to pay for preference data from real scenarios, and that window is open right now. Once LMArena launches vertical leaderboards and a mobile app, or StudyArena covers more subjects, small teams are left with narrower languages and industries.
What would show this read is wrong: ① if StudyArena discloses a data deal with a model company or closes its next round, the business is better than it looks and this should be raised to B; ② conversely, if "never got paid" posts keep growing on Reddit, the earn page cuts limits, or it drops some countries, the subsidies aren't sustainable and the install curve will fall; ③ if installs reach 200k while reviews stay at a few dozen, most people are freeloaders and this data won't sell at a premium.
Research notes: competitor table, acquisition evidence, full research report
- Competitors
Name Where Launched Scale How it differs from this one LMArena / Arena Web 2023 (founded in 2025, $100M seed) The de facto standard for LLM evaluation Also blind voting, but open to everyone on all tasks, no official app. StudyArena covers only student homework, is a native app, and pays the voters. Poe Android 2023 Play 11.5M installs Users pick the models themselves, no blind testing or head-to-head, monetized by subscription Gauth Android 2021 135M installs on Play, +7M in the last 4.91 days Snap a photo for one answer, heavy paid acquisition, no multi-model comparison Brainly / Question.AI / Knowunity / CK-12 Flexi Android 2015–2024 Several million to 300M installs One-answer homework helper / community, no blind comparison SQUID Chat - All AI in one Android Unknown Play 15k installs Multi-model aggregator, no blind testing, not aimed at learning ChatHub / TypingMind Chrome 2023 Small niche Side-by-side multiple models, needs your own key or subscription, no blind testing, doesn't pay users ChatGPT / Gemini study modes Big-company features 2025 Huge One model, one answer Storra Other 2025 Nigerian team of 4 Local Nigerian "learn and earn" answer-for-cash app, no AI multi-model comparison - Where users come from
- Verified School-email signup cashback: multiple posts on Reddit r/IndiaReferral: signing up with a school email earns ₹250–500, PayPal arrives in 1 business days, with a studyarena.com/r/ invite code; the official /jobs page says school-email cash rewards are given by country
- Verified "Earn while you learn" Scholars / Earn program: studyarena.com/earn: up to $100 a month; local-currency pages include the Philippines ₱5,000 (GCash), India ₹8,000, Indonesia, Brazil, the UK, and Ireland; matches the chart spread in Nigeria, the Philippines, Kenya, and Pakistan
- Verified paid research projects / campus ambassadors: Mercer University career center 2026-08-17 posted "StudyArena Instead of GPT" at $20–100 per month; Campus Ambassador roles on Wellfound
- Verified Campus street-team bounties: /jobs/bounties 16 tasks: flyers at dorm doors $50–55, class demos, and recruiting club sponsorships $50, paid via Zelle/Venmo/PayPal
- Verified Student creators / invite codes: /jobs/creator-application recruits paid TikTok/Reels creators. Codes like STUDYTEA, ALEXGI and EARLYFRIENDS show up; TikHub search found no videos with real reach.
- Verified Founder posts + SEO: r/studytips post "I built a free tool..."; site /vs comparison pages, a blog, and the open-source awesome-study-tools directory.
- Inferred Paid ads (Meta/Google): nothing in our ad libraries. The one-day jumps on 10-12 and 10-21 are unexplained.
StudyArena: AI Study Tutor (ai.studyarena.android) research report
Research date 2026-11-06. Sources: our googleplay database (app_day / chart_rank / app_day_ext; installs estimated by AppstoreSpy), the meta/google ad libraries, the Play store page, the studyarena.com pages, and Reddit/Exa/Jina search results.
One line
A YC W25 company, A1Base (A1Zap), built a student version of LMArena: three anonymous AI models answer a homework question side by side, you vote, and then the models are revealed. Installs were not organic. They were bought with cash: rewards for signing up with a school email, the Scholars plan paying up to $100/month to "learn and earn", campus street-team bounties, and ambassador and creator programs. The money comes back like this: student votes build a "which model is best at homework" leaderboard that gets sold to AI labs (per the site's own copy), plus school partnerships and a $20/month Supporter subscription. Put plainly, it is a preference data / crowdsourced labeling business wrapped in a study app.
1. Basic data
- Developer: listed on Play as A1Zaps; developer info is A1Base Inc., San Francisco, 128 King St, [email protected]. Founders: Pasha Rayan (co-founded Forage / InsideSherpa, YC W19, both since acquired; Forage reached 10M+ users and partnered with 5000+ universities) and Pennie Li (CTO, Forage employee #3). Sources: studyarena.com/blog/authors, a1zap.com/about.
- Listings: Play 2026-08-28; iOS "Study Arena: AI Homework Help" (id6800842124) on the 2026-09-02 store, rated 0 in the US store (iTunes lookup). Also a web app, a desktop app, and a Chrome extension (1 ratings on the Chrome Web Store). Terms of service effective 2026-08-07.
- Install curve (AppstoreSpy estimates, googleplay.app_day_ext): 9-19 352 → 9-28 1,028 → 10-05 2,814 → 10-12 14,101 → 10-21 31,601 → 11-05 61,548. September was nearly flat, then climbed sharply from October 7. 10-12 (+6.2k) and 10-21 (+8.1k) show one-day jumps, and after that it settled at roughly 2–3k per day. Last 7 days: +19,900 (from the data card).
- Charts (googleplay.chart_rank): only the Education Top Free chart in Nigeria, ranks 42–52, and in the Philippines, ranks 150–190. AppWinners also shows Education Top Free charting from 10-19 in Kenya (best #24/#31), Pakistan (#40) and Uganda. Every market is low-income with strong demand for "earn money" apps. The US store has no chart presence at all.
- Ratings: 4.3 stars from 14 reviews on the Play tablet listing, and the developer replies to every one. The reviews read like genuine new users ("best for students", "won't open without internet"); nothing suggests they're fake.
2. Competitors
| Competitors | Where | Launched | Scale | How StudyArena differs |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| LMArena / Arena(arena.ai) | Web | 2023 (a Berkeley project), then 2025 incorporated the company and raised a $100M seed round | The de facto standard for LLM evaluation | Also blind-vote comparisons, but open to everyone and every task, with no official mobile app. StudyArena only does student homework, ships as a native app, and pays the people who vote. |
| Poe | Android / iOS / web | 2023 | Play 11.5M installs | Lets you pick among multiple models yourself, with no blind testing and no comparisons; monetized by subscription |
| Gauth | Android/iOS | 2021 | 135M installs on Play, +7M in the last 4.91 days | Photo-to-single-answer, ByteDance, heavy paid acquisition |
| Brainly / Question.AI / Knowunity / Filo / CK-12 Flexi | Android/iOS | 2015–2024 | Several million to 300M installs | Single-answer homework helper / community; no multi-model comparison |
| SQUID Chat - All AI in one | Android | Unknown | Play 15k installs | Multi-model aggregator, no blind testing, not aimed at learning |
| Multi-model aggregators like ChatHub and TypingMind | Web / Chrome | 2023– | Small niche | Shows several models side by side; users bring their own keys or subscribe. No blind testing, and no paying users. |
| ChatGPT / Gemini / Claude study modes | Big-company features | 2025 | Huge | One model, one answer. Gemini giving students free premium is the strongest substitute. |
| Storra (Nigeria, TEF '25) | Other | 2025 | Team of 4 | A local precedent for "learn and earn" in Nigeria: answer questions, redeem points for cash |
Verdict: the "three anonymous models answer, you vote" format already exists in LMArena, so it isn't new. What's new is focusing it on student homework, plus paying students to use it.
3. Growth tactics (evidence)
- Cash referral: school-email signup bonus (confirmed). Several Reddit r/IndiaReferral posts over 2026 years read "[StudyArena] ₹500 reward for students with college/school email" and "sign up with a school email and get ₹250,1 via PayPal within working days", with studyarena.com/r/ invite codes. The site's /jobs page says: "School-email cash rewards may be available depending on their country and remaining places."
- "Learn and earn" Scholars / Earn plan (confirmed, the main channel). studyarena.com/earn says "Every question you ask earns money… up to $100 a month", with local-currency caps by country: UK £80, Ireland €90, Brazil R$500, Indonesia Rp1,500,000, Philippines ₱5,000 (paid to GCash or mobile airtime), India ₹8,000. Qualifying means asking real study questions and voting, with anti-fraud review. This steers the user pool toward Nigeria, the Philippines, Kenya and Pakistan, markets that respond to "earn money" apps, which matches the chart distribution. Dedicated Nigeria and Kenya pages 404, but how traffic gets there (likely WhatsApp/Telegram forwards of the "earn" link) is unverified.
- "StudyArena Instead of GPT" paid research study (confirmed). Mercer University career center listing 2026-08-17: use StudyArena instead of ChatGPT for a few weeks, $20–100 a month. A global remote Campus Ambassador role is posted on Wellfound, contact Pasha Rayan.
- Street-team bounties (confirmed). /jobs/bounties lists 16 bounty tasks: flyers left at 150 dorms for $50, 400 scans for $55, demos for classes or clubs of 10+ people, club sponsorships for $50, paid via Zelle/Venmo/PayPal. This is the US campus playbook, continuing the "start on campus" path of Forage and A1Zap.
- Student creators / UGC (confirmed to exist, scale unknown). /jobs/creator-application recruits paid student creators for TikTok, Reels and Shorts. Search results show creator codes like STUDYTEA and ALEXGI, plus EARLYFRIENDS, which redeems 3 months of Supporter. A TikHub search for "studyarena" found no videos with meaningful reach.
- Founder self-posting / SEO (confirmed). r/studytips has "I built a free tool to compare different AI tools for studying". The site has /vs comparison pages (vs Poe, Perplexity, Arena, Quizlet, Coconote), a blog, author pages and the open-source awesome-study-tools directory, all SEO / GEO groundwork. The trystudyarena Facebook page has posts, and people share it in AI education groups.
- Paid ads: our Meta and Google ad libraries show nothing. The libraries only track products on our list, so absence isn't proof they didn't advertise. The one-day steps on 10-12 and 10-21 could come from a reward campaign or an ad launch, unverified.
4. Why it took off
- Paying for users, and the rewards are real money: a school-email bonus (₹250–500) plus up to $100/month in study earnings amounts to a side income in Nigeria, the Philippines, Kenya and Pakistan, so installs naturally cluster there. Every chart appearance is in those countries; the US has none.
- The math works because the users are the product: every "real question + three answers + human vote" is a labeled, domain-tagged human preference data point. LMArena showed this data is valuable ($100M seed round), and StudyArena's site says plainly "AI labs buy the scoreboard". So the money paid to students is data acquisition cost, not ad spend. Requiring a school email, anti-fraud checks and "real study questions" exist to protect data quality.
- The team has resources: founders who've been through YC twice, and Forage ran campus distribution at 5000+ universities, so the ambassador, bounty and university career-center machine could start on day one.
- The product hook is easy to sell: "ask ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and DeepSeek for free" and "compare before you pay for an AI subscription". That appeals to students who can't afford several subscriptions.
- Timing: there are many models and subscriptions are expensive, so students don't know which one to pay for. Labs want more real-world preference data (LMArena's commercialization, and everyone competing for RLHF data).
5. Differentiation
Versus LMArena: scoped to student homework, built as a native app, with study features like notebooks, photo input and follow-up questions, and the votes published as a "student homework leaderboard". Versus homework apps like Poe and Gauth: it doesn't give one answer but three blind answers. What made it take off isn't the product difference. It's the business-model difference: paying users and selling their votes. That decides where users come from (low-income students who want to earn money) and how long it can keep subsidizing them. The product format itself (blind three-way vote) is easy for anyone to copy; LMArena has done it for two years.
6. Visibility / copycats
- Revenue isn't public. Not on TrustMRR. The local x-radar corpus has 0 mentions of "studyarena" over the last 90 days, and no major media coverage turned up. What's visible: Reddit India cashback groups, university career-center listings, and a few AI tool directories (aitools-directory, AppWinners, AppBrain). It's spreading in small circles, through cashback and earning groups rather than tech media.
- Copycats: none spotted directly copying it. studyarena.app is a same-name but unrelated study product (uploads course material and generates review packs), so it doesn't count as a copy.
7. What to borrow
- "Users are the data suppliers": by framing the subsidy as data acquisition, ad spend becomes data cost, and paying users openly is allowed.
- Rewards are priced in local currency and paid through local rails (GCash, mobile airtime, PayPal), with country-specific landing pages (/paid/ph, /paid/in).
- A school email as the identity gate blocks bonus-hunters and builds a demographic profile for the data.
- Growth tasks are standardized as bounties (flyer drops, class demos) and paid per piece.
- /vs comparison pages, author pages and awesome-list directories, for SEO and for being cited by AI.
8. Uncertain
- How many of the 60k installs came for the rewards, and how well they're retained, is unknown. Play has only 14 reviews, which is low for 60k installs and suggests low activity.
- Whether any AI lab actually bought the data, and for how much, is unverified.
- Which specific channels drive traffic to Nigeria and Kenya is unverified (there are no dedicated pages there, so it's possibly the global pages plus forwarding groups).
- Whether they ran Meta / Google / TikTok ads: our libraries show nothing, but that can't be ruled out.
- Supporter $20/mo paid users unknown; Play in-app shows "$1.00 per item".