Disclosure up front: this is our own product, and we made it. Nothing here is a neutral review. It is a build-in-public post about a small bet, including the parts that might not work.
The product is LectureVault, an Obsidian study vault for students: https://nandminc.gumroad.com/l/lecturevault-kit
The wedge, honestly
Free Cornell-notes printables exist, and they are fine. They give you one page. They do not tell you where that page goes, when to review it, or what your grade looks like halfway through the term. That gap is the whole product: free templates give one page, we sell the system.
On the other side, generic study apps with subscriptions monetize capture. They do not guarantee that any of the three failures students actually hit get fixed: capture scatters, review never happens, and weighted grade arithmetic surprises you late in the semester.
One observation, and we want to label it as that and not as a market study: we found no direct incumbent in the Obsidian student-vault niche, using Gumroad discover queries and autocomplete. The adjacent Notion student-template market is crowded, with 716 results and a 4509-rated incumbent at $24.99. We deliberately do not sell into it.
Why plain markdown
Zero dependencies was the design constraint. The vault is 18 files: 17 markdown files plus LICENSE.txt. No code, no scripts, no CSV or XLSX. Every table renders in stock Obsidian. There is exactly one Dataview snippet, under the standard OPTIONAL banner, and the kit says "No plugins required." There are zero URLs, zero accounts and zero network steps inside the vault itself.
For a developer audience, the interesting part is that the "architecture" is a contract between files:
- Two lecture templates (Cornell three-zone and outline hierarchy) share one four-key front-matter contract:
course,date,lecturer,topics. - A naming rule,
PSY101-Lecture-03-2026-09-02.md, keeps courses sorted in teaching order. - Each template ends with a four-checkbox questions-to-review handoff that feeds the revision topics file.
- Flashcard IDs are
FC-##, exactly five characters, with due and drilled columns.
What shipped
Compressed list of what is in the box:
- A per-course map of content: syllabus facts, an exam status ladder (not started, reviewing, done, locked), an assignments table whose weights sum to 100 percent, a lecture index and a revision-topics rollup.
- A semester planner with key dates, a deadlines-this-week rule that uses whole days left, and a weekly rhythm.
- An exam countdown and a semester overview, each as a filled Fall 2026 example and a blank shell.
- Revision topics with confidence 1 to 5 and next-review dates, plus a six-pass spaced-repetition ladder: day after class, +3, +7, +14, +30, and a final pre-exam pass.
- A study-session log with a closed five-word method vocabulary, minutes, focus 1 to 5, outcome and next action.
- A running-grade tracker that computes weighted points to two decimals. Unscored rows are excluded, never counted as zero. The projection is stated as arithmetic, not a prediction.
- An SQ3R course-reading note (no citations, no reference manager, no bibliography export), a flashcard inbox with an Anki export written as an instruction and not a file, and a study-methods guide in original prose.
The worked examples follow a fictional student across a fictional Fall 2026 semester, and we reconciled the numbers by hand: the grade example lands on 88.6 percent from 65 percent counted weight, and the session log example totals 4 sessions, 205 minutes. All names of people, courses, instructors and figures in the worked example are fictional.
The price is a deliberate choice
The current intro price is $1.00 USD. The price may step up as sales accrue, so check the page. The ladder is: after 10 confirmed sales it goes to $1.50, then rises 20 percent every 5 sales, capped at $5.00. We are not promising it stays at $1.
Why so low? A dollar removes the decision. A student who is unsure can try the structure for less than a coffee, and a low cap keeps us honest about what a folder of markdown files is worth.
Zero reviews, and we are not pretending
It launched on 2026-10-27. There are no reviews and no ratings. We have no testimonials to show you and no sales numbers worth quoting. If that changes, i,t will show on the product page, not in a blog post we wrote.
Limits
This kit is study structure, not a guarantee of any grade, GPA, admission, or degree. The license is personal use, no resale. If a free one-page Cornell template already works for you, keep using it.
Feedback on the contract design is welcome in the comments, especially from anyone who has tried to keep a semester in plain files.
The longer, fact-checked write-up: https://aistacklab2026.blogspot.com/2026/10/obsidian-for-students-lecture-notes.html
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