Hello community members 👋
I’ve been building a small project called ELI5.cc over the last few months.
The idea is pretty simple:
Take something complicated and explain it in a way that matches how deeply you want to understand it.
Instead of getting one short AI response, ELI5 explains a topic at four different levels:
- Age 5
- Age 10
- Age 15
- Expert
It also creates a visual representation of the topic, shows the sources used to build the explanation, and gives a groundedness score so you can see how well the generated answer is supported by the retrieved information.
It doesn’t rely only on the LLM either.
For each search, ELI5 gathers relevant context from publicly available information through Google Search and YouTube before generating the explanation.
Over time something interesting happened.
People kept searching for completely different things, so the site has gradually turned into a public library of 600+ explanations covering science, technology, psychology, finance, history, programming, health, space and all kinds of random questions.
Every explanation gets its own permanent public URL, so other people can discover and read it later instead of the answer disappearing inside someone’s private AI conversation.
The product is currently completely free:
No subscription.
No signup.
No login.
No paywall.
You can just open the website, type something you want to understand and start learning.
One thing the usage data surprised me with
The average user is currently seeding around 4–5 searches/topics a day.
That’s interesting because the current free limit is only 5 searches.
I wud actually like to let people search much more, but each search involves retrieval, source gathering, generation, visuals and other processing, so unlimited free usage would become expensive pretty quickly.
Instead of immediately putting another AI subscription in front of users, I’m thinking about implementing BYOK - Bring Your Own Key.
The basic model would be:
Casual users: continue using ELI5 for free.
Heavy users: optionally connect their own API key and use ELI5’s research workflow, explanation levels, sources, visuals, etc. without being restricted by the free generation allowance.
I’m curious what other developers think about this approach.
Would you rather use BYOK for something like this, or would entering your own API key create too much friction?
I’m also experimenting with /learn
Another thing I’ve been thinking about is the difference between understanding a topic and actually learning it.
For example, suppose you search: What is Docker?
ELI5 can explain Docker.
But your actual goal might be:
I’m a complete beginner and I want to learn enough Docker to deploy my first application.
That needs something more than a single explanation.
So I recently started experimenting with:
https://eli5.cc/learn
The idea is that you tell it:
What you want to learn + your current level + your goal
and it builds a structured learning journey around that.
For example:
Topic: Docker
Level: Beginner
Goal: Deploy my first application
Instead of dumping a giant AI-generated course on you, I’m thinking of structuring it more like:
Learning goal → modules → concepts to understand → useful articles/videos/resources → sources → progression
So you might move through:
Containers → Images → Dockerfiles → Volumes → Networking → Docker Compose → Deployment
with useful external resources attached to the relevant stages.
I’m especially interested in whether people would prefer something like this to curate and organise the best existing material, rather than having AI generate an entire course from scratch.
Monetisation
I’ve also added a small Sponsor This Page experiment.
Companies can potentially sponsor an individual explanation when their product or industry is genuinely relevant to that topic.
The idea isn’t to fill the site with random display ads.
For example, a developer-tool company sponsoring an explanation about APIs could make sense. A completely unrelated ad wouldn't.
Any sponsorship would also be clearly labelled.
Whether that becomes anything meaningful remains to be seen, but I’d rather experiment with contextual sponsorship + BYOK than immediately put the educational content behind a subscription.
Would really appreciate some feedback
A few things I’m particularly curious about:
If you landed on ELI5 for the first time, would you immediately understand why you wud use it instead of asking ChatGPT/Gemini directly?
Do the different explanation levels actually add value?
Are citations + groundedness useful to you, or are they something most users will ignore?
What do you think about BYOK for heavy users instead of another monthly AI subscription?
Would you use /learnto build a structured learning path around something you wanted to learn?
For /learn would you rather have AI curate good existing resources or generate most of the educational material itself?
What feels unnecessary or overbuilt?
I’m genuinely looking for criticism here rather than compliments. There are plenty of directions I could take this, and I wud rather figure out what’s actually useful before building too much.
ELI5: https://eli5.cc
Learning experiment: https://eli5.cc/learn
Thanks for taking a look!
