pbmate.ro alternatives: 3 free & open-source picks
Curated, verified, and actually free. No trials, no crippled tiers. Star counts and last-activity dates checked by hand, not scraped and forgotten.
Full maths courses, exercises and hints in Romanian, free forever. It teaches the subject well and ignores the exam calendar entirely.
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.
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.
last updated 2026-08-14 · no votes, no pay-to-list · just what's real
GeoGebraSuperb, free, and the wrong shape: it hands you an instrument, never a graded problem set. Adjacent tool, not an alternative.
PhotomathSolves the problem in front of the camera instead of building a practice habit, and the step-by-step explanations sit behind the paid tier.
AnkiExcellent scheduler, empty box. It replaces the review loop and none of the maths.
| tool | license | running it | platforms | stars | active |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Khan Academy România | free (closed) | they host it | web, ios, android | — | — |
| Subiecte și bareme oficiale | free (closed) | they host it | web | — | — |
| Manuale digitale | free (closed) | they host it | web | — | — |
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. If none of that applies to you, any pick above saves $210.84 a year.
Is there a free alternative to pbmate.ro?
Yes: Khan Academy România, Subiecte și bareme oficiale, Manuale digitale. Every tool on this page is either open source or genuinely free to use long-term: no trials, no crippled tiers.
Should I just build my own pbmate.ro?
Our verdict is NOT REALLY. 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. If you'd rather build, the exact one-shot prompt is free at canivibecodeit.com/pbmate.
