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.
01What it costs
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
Full maths courses, exercises and hints in Romanian, free forever. It teaches the subject well and ignores the exam calendar entirely.
ro.khanacademy.org →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 →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
Read the verdict first: this one is hard to get right.
The complete build prompt, plus 11 step-by-step prompts from research to launch, a design system file, a page-by-page spec, the data model and a launch checklist.
Get the Build Kit · $9 →One-time payment. Delivered on screen and by email.
06Free open-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.
Prices change; confirm on the vendor's site before you decide.
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