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Can AI replace pbmate.ro?

The trainer is not the product. An agent will hand you a clean multiple-choice runner with LaTeX, hints and a mastery chart in one evening, and then you will be staring at an empty database. What is actually being sold here is roughly 5.000 published problems mapped chapter by chapter to the Romanian programa, the official Bacalaureat and Evaluare Națională papers rebuilt as interactive tests with every marking scheme re-derived rather than trusted, and four role surfaces (pupil, parent, teacher, plus an iOS app) grown over more than 2.300 commits. A language model will cheerfully generate a thousand Romanian maths problems for you, and a worrying share will carry a wrong answer key, a hint that leaks the answer, or a chapter label that does not match the programa. You will not find out which until a child gets one wrong for the wrong reason. Check a hundred by hand and the price stops looking mysterious. Build the trainer if you enjoy building; the honest free move is the ministry's own paper archive, not a rebuild.

Verdict: Nah · Keep paying, or use a free alternativeBuild time: one sitting for the trainer, months for the problems
Nah

01What it costs

$17.57/moPremium, monthly, per child
$210.84per year at that price

Checked Aug 14, 2026 · source: pbmate.ro. There is a permanent free tier and no trial: the daily challenge, three practice problems a day and a dozen library problems stay free, and the rest of the bank, the tests and the written solutions are behind the subscription.

02Could AI build it for you?

The core job: A local trainer for maths problems you author yourself: pick a chapter, work through five problems, reveal graded hints, then the full solution, and watch a per chapter mastery bar move.

What a working version needs:

  • Node 22
  • your own problem set, or the public Bacalaureat and Evaluare Națională PDFs
  • optional Anthropic or OpenAI API key for draft extraction from those PDFs
  • somebody willing to solve every problem before trusting its answer key

Submitted by the maker and graded against the same bar as everything else, which lands it on not really. Prices read off the live landing page on 2026-08-14.

03What you'd give up

  • roughly 5.000 vetted problems, each tied to a chapter of the Romanian programa and a difficulty tier
  • official exam papers rebuilt as interactive tests, with each marking scheme re-derived point by point
  • three progressive hints and a written solution on every problem, not just the correct letter
  • the parent and teacher surfaces, assigned homework, and the iOS app
  • somebody maintaining all of it when the programa or the exam format shifts

People pay because the maths is the easy part. A Romanian parent is buying problems that are correct, at the right difficulty, in the right chapter of the right programa, with a solution that reads like a teacher wrote it, and papers that behave like the real exam. That is an editorial job with no shortcut: every item has to be solved by a human before it can be trusted with a child's grade. The subscription buys somebody else doing that work, and continuing to do it when the exam format moves.

04Free and cheaper alternatives

Khan Academy Româniafree

Full maths courses, exercises and hints in Romanian, free forever. It teaches the subject well and ignores the exam calendar entirely.

ro.khanacademy.org →
Subiecte și bareme oficialefree

Every exam paper and marking scheme the ministry publishes, free, and the single best reason not to pay anyone for PDFs. It serves the current session only, so the archive is whatever you saved or the Wayback Machine kept.

subiecte.edu.ro →
Manuale digitalefree

The state's digital textbooks with their built-in exercises, free for every grade. Coverage is the textbook rather than exam drilling, and the interactive parts have aged the way state web projects age.

manuale.edu.ro →

05The build prompt

Paste this into an AI coding tool (such as Claude, ChatGPT, Lovable or Replit) to build your own version. Read the verdict first: this one is hard to get right.

prompt.txt
Build a personal Romanian maths practice trainer in an empty folder.
Stack: Next.js 15 (App Router), TypeScript, SQLite via better-sqlite3, Tailwind, KaTeX. Do not offer alternatives.
Problems live as Markdown files in content/problems, one per file, with frontmatter: id, chapter, grade, difficulty 1 to 5, statement, four options, correctIndex, hints (up to three, ordered nudge -> method -> setup), solution.
Write `npm run import` to validate every file into SQLite, failing loudly on a missing correctIndex, an out-of-range difficulty, an unknown chapter, or a hint containing the final answer as a substring.
Ship exactly three seed problems as format examples plus a chapters.json for one grade, taken from the official programa. Generate no problems yourself.
Practice loop: pick a chapter, get five problems ordered easy to hard, answer, then reveal hints one at a time before the solution.
Record every attempt (problem id, chosen option, correct, seconds, hints used) in SQLite.
Show a per-chapter mastery bar from the last twenty attempts on that chapter and a weak-chapters list. No streaks, no badges, no daily guilt.
Add `npm run drill` that serves only problems previously answered wrong.
Render maths with KaTeX inline and display, and verify the seed problems render before you finish.
Handle Romanian diacritics correctly in the files and the UI.
Add `npm run export` writing all attempts to CSV, and keep every byte on the local disk.
If ANTHROPIC_API_KEY is set in .env, add an optional `npm run draft -- paper.pdf` that turns an exam PDF into draft Markdown in content/drafts, never imported until a human moves the file, and print a warning that the answer key is unverified.
Secrets in .env, ship .env.example, commit neither.
Test the importer validation rules and one end-to-end five-problem session.
Write a README covering setup, the problem file format, and how to add a chapter.
Leave out: accounts, payments, hosting, telemetry, parent and teacher views, a mobile app, and anything claiming to grade a real exam.
Finish by running the import and the tests, then print the exact commands used.

06Open-source starting points

  • KaTeX: Renders the maths in every statement fast enough that a practice loop does not feel like a PDF.
  • FSRS: The scheduler to borrow if you want spaced review instead of a random shuffle.
  • Moodle question bank: A schema for questions, answers and per attempt grading that has survived twenty years of schools, if you would rather not invent one.
Sponsor slot · openFeatured alternative to pbmate.ro. A labeled card for one relevant tool.
Book this spot →

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App prices, verdicts, alternatives and build prompts are adapted from Can I Vibecode It? (MIT License, © 2026 Rob Hallam). Each price shows the date it was checked and its source. Prices change; confirm on the vendor's site before you decide.