Built a free FSRS settings calculator — wraps the workload simulator into a clean UI, would love feedback on the recommendations
I've been frustrated for a while that there's no clean tool for figuring out optimal Anki settings based on your actual study window. The FSRS workload simulator is great but it lives behind a wall of UI. So I built a calculator.
You enter:
- Card count
- Days until your exam (or "ongoing study")
- Your goal (cram / learn / mastery)
- The perceived difficulty of the content
It outputs recommendations across Daily Limits, New Cards, Lapses, and FSRS sections — including desired retention, learning steps, leech threshold, etc. You can download a .apkg with these settings already embedded so you don't have to manually configure anything in Anki.
The algorithm wraps FSRS's existing retention math and layers deterministic heuristics on top for the fields FSRS doesn't cover (learning steps, insertion order, leech thresholds). It doesn't replace FSRS — it just makes the configuration decisions that FSRS leaves to the user.
Disclosure: the app also has an AI-powered deck generator (Gemini-based) but that's not what I'm sharing here — the calculator is its own standalone tool and has no AI in it. The recommendations are fully deterministic.
Link: highyield.cards (calculator is on the right side of the screen — free, no account needed)
Genuinely curious whether the recommendations hold up against experienced users' intuitions. Specifically:
- Do the learning steps feel right for your content difficulty?
- Does the retention target scaling make sense across cram/learn/mastery?
- Any edge cases I should handle?