Heddy is an iOS app carrying eight AI tutors who will not hand over the answer to your homework — not because they can't work it out, but because a tutor who does that has taught you nothing.
That single refusal is the whole product. Everything else in the app — the flashcards, the week check, the owl on the home screen — exists to make the refusal survivable, because being walked to an answer is slower and harder than being given 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. The app is free to start, needs no account to open, and is built for students aged 13 and over in the UK.
Inside it you get three things:
Eight tutors. Heddy herself — a snowy owl who is a guide, not a mascot — plus seven subject professors: Pi (maths), Quill (English), Darwin (biology), Curie (chemistry), Newton (physics), Harari (history) and Mercator (geography). Heddy's job is to point you at the right one and keep an eye on the kind of week you're having. The professors' job is to teach.
A hint ladder, four rungs, no exit. Ask any professor a question and you get a nudge, then a bigger nudge, then a method, and at the top — a fully worked similar problem, followed by "now redo yours". You never get the answer to the problem in front of you. The ladder is explained properly here.
Flashcards, free and unlimited, forever. Cards are made from your own sessions, scheduled by spaced repetition, and reviewing them never costs you anything. Not a turn, not a credit, not a subscription tier.
The one gesture the app is designed around
You're reviewing a card. You've got it wrong three times. You know the words and you don't know the thing.
On the back of that card, after you tap Again, there's a way to take that exact card to the professor who owns the subject. Tap it and you land in their room with the question already asked:
Can we go deeper on this flashcard together?
Q: your card's front A: your card's back
Help me really understand this.
It is sent, not offered. You don't have to compose anything at the moment you're most fed up. That handover is the product, and it's the reason the cards and the tutors are in the same app rather than two.
What you don't have to do
You don't sign up. There is no account screen anywhere in the first run. Three slides introduce Heddy, you tap Start learning, and you're in. No email, no password, no "continue with Apple", no permission prompts before you've seen anything.
You don't ask a parent first. Most tutoring products reach a teenager through an adult's decision — an adult's subscription, an adult's login. Heddy is a door you can open yourself. A grown-up comes into it later, by your tap, if you want more.
You don't get nagged. No countdown timers, no "your streak is about to die", no notification designed to make you anxious. That isn't restraint for its own sake — the ICO's Children's Code treats nudge techniques aimed at minors as a compliance issue, and we'd rather be on the right side of it by construction. Momentum language only: 3-day streak, never you'll lose your streak.
What it costs
Flashcards are free and unlimited, from the first tap, forever. They cost us almost nothing to run, and they're the habit the whole thing depends on.
Tutor turns are metered — Pi Turns — because a real conversation with a professor costs real money to serve. When you run out, three things happen that are worth knowing in advance:
- A ladder that has started always finishes. Turns are spent when a new problem starts, never in the middle of one. You will never be cut off mid-hint.
- You are never shown a purchase prompt during a session. The upgrade screen exists, but you can only reach it from a screen at rest.
- The empty state offers cards, not a card number. Heddy dozes off — eyes shut, two little zs — and gives you two buttons: Practise cards and Remind me tomorrow. That's it.
The full explanation of Pi Turns is here.
Who it's for, and who it isn't
It's for a 13-to-16-year-old in a UK school who has homework they're stuck on and would rather not ask a person. KS3 and early GCSE is the sweet spot — the syllabus the tutors know best.
It isn't for a child under 13. That's a hard floor. If you're a parent of a younger child, the main aitutors.me service is the route — it's parent-provisioned, which is what the rules for younger children reasonably require.
It isn't for someone who wants an answer machine. There are excellent apps that photograph a maths problem and return a worked solution in four seconds. Heddy is deliberately slower than all of them, and if what you need tonight is the answer to question 7, one of those will serve you better. We say which ones, honestly, in our comparisons.
And if you're the parent reading over a shoulder
The short version: no conversation of your child's is shown to you in the app, by design. The guardian email we ask for at the upgrade moment is a receipt and a safeguarding contact, not a surveillance feed. Any safeguarding indicator in a conversation hard-fails to the same line every time — If you're struggling, please talk to a parent or call Childline 0800 1111 — regardless of what the tutor was doing.
The longer version, including the age floor, the data and what we deliberately don't build, is here.
Updated 10 Sep 2026. Written by Duke Harewood, who builds the tutors at aitutors.me.