RajyaPrep, a daily exam platform built and run solo

In brief#

RajyaPrep is a paid daily practice platform for India's competitive exams. I designed, built, launched and run it alone: product, design, engineering, payments, SEO and content operations. It went from first commit in May 2026 to a public launch with live payments in September 2026.

The challenge#

Aspirants for India's competitive exams, from UPSC and State PSCs to SSC, banking, railways and defence, spend hours every day turning the news into the questions an examiner might ask. Most question banks are stale, unsourced, or both, and the ones that are current rarely say where a fact came from.

RajyaPrep does that work for them, so their time goes into practice rather than preparing to practise. The goal was one trustworthy, habit-sized paper a day that a serious candidate can finish in under half an hour, and that sends them back to deeper reading rather than replacing it.

What I delivered#

• A daily paper. Thirty current-affairs questions published daily. Every option is explained, and every question names the source it was built from, so a candidate can check it for themselves.
• Subject tests. Fifteen-question tests across eleven subjects, mapped to more than thirty named exams.
• Revisit 15. Finish five daily papers and the platform unlocks fifteen questions you previously got wrong. It is earned through practice, never sold.
• Daily motivation. A public daily and thirty-day leaderboard, streaks, progress tracking and share cards that update every day.
• Try before paying. Free preview questions from today's paper and from every subject with no sign-up, and a free first subject test with an account.
• Simple, honest pricing. One paper, one standard: no thinner free edition and no premium tier. Plans differ only by duration, from a single paper to a full year. Every plan is a one-time payment by UPI, card or netbanking, nothing renews on its own, and there is a published refund policy.
• Built for phones. Sign in with a phone number or Google, and add it to the home screen like an app.
• Content protection. Copy protection with per-candidate watermarking to discourage resale of the question bank.

Timeline#

• May 2026: product design and build began.
• June 2026: first production release behind a private preview.
• September 2026: payments live, public launch, and every public page indexed by search engines within days.

How I approached it#

• Trust is the product. AI assists with research and drafting, and every question carries the source it was built from and an explanation for every option. A candidate should never have to take an answer on faith.
• The server decides access. Who can open what is decided on the server alone, and a paid window always runs its full length.
• Every public claim verified. Numbers on the site are checked against the running system before they ship. On launch day that check caught and fixed four claims that were no longer true.
• Performance is a feature. Pages are built mobile-first and measured with PageSpeed Insights before release.
• Lean by design. Idle software is measured and removed and logs are bounded, so a one-person product stays cheap to run and simple to operate.

Results#

• A paid product in production, end to end: content, accounts, plans and payments.
• PageSpeed Insights all green on mobile and 100 on desktop, with perfect accessibility, best-practice and SEO scores, in launch week.
• Every public page indexed by search engines within days of launch.

What running it taught me#

• Watch what the user sees, not whether the job succeeded. A background job can finish "green" and still publish nothing. The check that matters is whether today's paper is actually there.
• Never delete what is running. An early release cleanup removed files the live service still needed and took the site down for two hours. Releases are now self-contained, and cleanup never touches the live or previous release.
• Constraints can become features. Recurring UPI payments did not work reliably in production, so the product moved to one-time plans, and "nothing renews on its own" became something candidates value.