Heddy is live on the App Store — and here is what it refuses to do
Heddy went live on the App Store on 22 September 2026. It is free to download. The most useful thing we can tell you about it is not what it does — it is the short list of things it will not do, because that list is the product.
Most launch posts open with a promise. This one opens with a refusal: a Heddy professor will never give a student the answer to the problem in front of them. Not when asked nicely, not when asked three times, not at eleven at night when the homework is due tomorrow. Everything else in the app exists to make that refusal survivable, because being walked to an answer is slower and harder than being handed one, and nobody keeps doing a hard thing unless the rest of it feels good.
What Heddy actually is
Heddy is made by aitutors.me, a UK tutoring service. It runs as an iOS app on the App Store and as a web app at heddy.app, and it follows the UK Key Stage 3 curriculum — ages 11 to 14, across seven subjects. GCSE is next.
Inside, there are eight tutors. Heddy herself is a snowy owl, and she is a guide rather than a mascot: she meets you at the door and hands you to the right professor. There are seven of those, one per subject. Pi takes maths. Newton takes physics. Curie takes chemistry. Darwin takes biology. Quill takes English. Harari takes history. Mercator takes geography. Mentor is the odd one out — Mentor teaches no subject at all, but reads the kind of week a student is having and points them at whichever professor that week actually calls for.
They are not seven skins on one chat window. Each professor teaches from the KS3 map: 700 named concepts and 1,147 prerequisite links across the seven subjects. A link is not decoration — it says what must be understood first and why. When Pi decides where to start with a Year 8 student who is stuck on solving equations, the map is what she is reading, which is also why the answer to "why are we doing this bit?" is always a specific one.
The other half of the app is flashcards, and they are free forever. Unlimited, no card details, and no sign-up needed to look around. There are six ways a card can ask you something — flip it, type the answer, choose from options, say it out loud, order the steps, or fill the gap — and the cards are made from the student's own sessions. Anything they miss in a conversation comes back as a card. The atlas of how that works is here.
The join between the two halves is the bit we are proudest of. Get a card wrong, and one tap carries that exact card to the professor who owns the topic, with the question already asked. The student does not have to compose anything at the moment they are most fed up. The card becomes a door.
The four rungs, and the missing fifth
The hint ladder is four rungs. A nudge, a bigger nudge, a method, and then — at the top — a fully worked similar problem, followed by "now redo yours".
That last rung is the whole design. It is a twin of the student's problem, worked end to end, with nothing hidden. Then the student's own problem is still sitting there, unsolved, and they now have everything they need to do it themselves. The difference between that and the answer is about ninety seconds of effort and all of the learning.
There is no fifth rung. We say that a lot, so it is worth saying precisely what it means: it is not a rule a tutor has been asked to follow, because rules that live in a prompt get argued with. The function that hands out a hint takes no level argument at all. There is no parameter to set, no number to increase, nothing to pass. A student who asks eleven times gets the same ladder, and a student who tries to talk their way past the top gets a worked twin and an invitation to redo their own. The full explanation of the ladder is here.
This is also the honest answer to the most common question we get, which is some version of how is this different from a chatbot? A general assistant answers the prompt in front of it. A professor keeps the learning goal, looks for the misconception underneath the mistake, and stops one rung short on purpose.
What it costs, and what a child can spend
The free tier is real, not a trial. Flashcards are unlimited and free forever, all six ways to practise included. On top of that you get 20 tutoring turns to try, with Mentor and one professor, which is enough to find out whether being refused an answer suits your student or annoys them.
Beyond that there is Heddy Plus: a monthly, per-child plan that a parent buys on aitutors.me. It opens all seven professors, removes the turn counter, and adds the homework photo, so a student can photograph a question and work through it line by line with the professor who owns it.
Here is the part that matters more than the plan. There is no in-app purchase at all. Not a locked tier, not a consumable, not a "continue for 5 more turns" button. There is nothing inside the app a child can tap that spends money, which means there is nothing a frustrated fourteen-year-old at half nine on a Tuesday can be nudged into buying. The money lives with the adult, on the web, in a place the child never has to look at. When a plan is bought, the app simply unlocks itself.
We also do not run the turn counter as a meter that can cut you off mid-sentence. You always know how much tutoring is left, and a conversation that has started is allowed to finish.
The other refusals
Answers are the headline refusal. There are three more worth naming, because they shape the app just as much.
Professors stay on their own subject. Ask Curie about a history essay and she will send you to Harari rather than have a go. This sounds like a limitation and is actually the safety model: a tutor with a narrow, stated job has a much smaller surface area for going somewhere it shouldn't than a general assistant with a friendly tone.
Anything serious stops the session. If a conversation touches something that needs a human, it is flagged for review by our team and the session ends so a parent can be told. The app does not try to counsel, and it does not quietly carry on.
We do not build the nagging. No countdown you are losing, no streak about to die, no notification engineered to make a child anxious about coming back. The longer list of what we deliberately will not do is here.
If you are downloading it tonight
Start with the cards. They cost nothing, they need no account, and they are the habit the whole thing depends on — five minutes on the bus is a real amount of revision. Then, the first time a card beats you, use the tap that carries it to the professor. That single gesture is the app working as designed, and it is the best ten minutes you can spend finding out whether Heddy is for you. Here is what those first ten minutes look like.
Heddy is on the App Store now, free to download: apps.apple.com/app/id6810290323.
Published 23 Sep 2026. Written by Duke Harewood, who builds the tutors at aitutors.me.