SaaSpocalypse Now

One teacher. Three days. Under $50.

SaaSpocalypse Now

The ed tech subscription is finished.

Try it yourself

A teachers' production · A Paper Loop picture

Written, directed and built in three days by Ben Adler

Starring 3.8 million public school teachers · One school copier · A stack of paper

Marking by Claude · Budget under $50 · No subscription required

Score: Ride of the Valkyries (future mix)

Coming to a classroom near you

Reel 1 · The tsunami

A wave was always coming for ed tech.

For years, cash-strapped districts paid for software that mostly sat unused and barely moved test scores, while reading fell. That business was never going to last.

I'm a teacher. I built Paper Loop in three days, as a side project, using under $50 of a monthly Claude plan. It does what the subscriptions promised: a specific comment on every answer, for every student, on paper, by morning. It's free.

Try it yourself See the receipts
A water cycle worksheet filled in by hand, with doodles in the margin. Beside each answer is a short typed comment, such as “Yes, water vapor from the air condenses on the cold glass, forming drops.” A summary box at the bottom names one strength.

A handwritten test page, marked by Paper Loop

  1. An ID number, never a name.
  2. A changed answer, read as the final choice.
  3. A comment beside every answer.
  4. Doodles ignored.
  5. One strength, named for the student.

Reel 2 · The receipts

Districts paid. Students didn't gain.

The decline started years before the pandemic. The money that followed it bought less than anyone hoped, and the software it bought mostly went unused.

2013

The year US reading and math scores started falling, seven years before schools closed for COVID.1

6 days

Extra learning bought by each $1,000 per student of federal relief money, 2022–2025. That's about what any general budget increase buys. Schools received about $190 billion.1

~70%

Paid software licenses never used, in the last two independent studies (2018 and 2019). Nobody has published a national figure since the relief money went out.23

+0.03

What one best-selling math program added on the state test in an independent randomized trial, in standard deviations. Another added +0.07. Neither was statistically significant.45

88%

Parents who believe their child reads at grade level. Report cards full of B's tell them so.6

Reel 3 · Why it was bound to happen

What works was always cheap. The expensive part was a teacher's time.

The strongest results in education research come from cheap, human things: students practicing what they learned, specific comments on their work, and parents told the truth. None of it needs a license. It needs someone to read every answer, and AI just made that nearly free.

“Reinforcement learning is how humans learn and how these machines learn.”

Bill Gates, to Nilay Patel on The Verge’s Decoder, October 22, 202618

Try, get specific feedback, try again. It’s how the models got good, and it’s what the research below keeps finding works for students.

Learning bought per dollar, compared with the relief money overall

Relief money, 2022–25 ≈ 6 days per $1,000
One high-dosage tutoring program ≈ 10× as much
Each $1,000 per student bought about 0.03 grade levels. The tutoring program studied by Guryan and colleagues bought about ten times that per dollar. Congress required only 20% of the main round of relief money to go to academic recovery.1

g = 0.50

Practice that makes students recall

Classroom quizzing, across 222 studies. A short worksheet the next day is retrieval practice.7

d = 0.48

Specific feedback

Feedback that says what to fix does about twice as well as the average. A grade beside a comment cancels the comment, so comments alone work best.89

+0.18

Marked homework, with the common wrong answers

A homework tool that raised scores in an independent 43-school trial works by marking every problem and showing the teacher which mistakes were common. Paper Loop does the same on paper.10

54 studies

Reading on paper

Readers understand informational text better on paper than on screens, and the gap is growing.11

27% fewer

Telling parents the truth

Weekly texts to parents about missed work, grades and absences cut course failures by 27%. 32,000 texts cost $63.12

1st

Mississippi's reading law

Screening every young reader, coaches in classrooms, a reading plan for each struggling student, a note to their parents, and a third-grade gate. After adjusting for student demographics, Mississippi now ranks first in 4th-grade reading.1314

Reel 4 · How little it took

Three days. One teacher. Under $50.

No startup, no grant, no team. I built Paper Loop between October 26 and 28, 2026, on an ordinary Claude subscription, using less than $50 of one month's plan. It was an afterthought. It will wipe out an industry as soon as teachers learn to use it.

3 days

From the first line of code to a finished plugin

< $50

Of a monthly Claude plan

1

Teacher, with no funding

301

Automated tests, all passing

2–12

Every grade, every subject

30+

Home languages, Arabic and Bengali included

What came out of those three days. Districts pay for each of these, every year.

  • Lesson plans, slides and worksheets for any topic
  • Marking from a copier scan, with a comment on every answer
  • Versions for students who need them: large print, scaffolds, home languages
  • Go-over slides built from what the class actually got wrong
  • A practice sheet for each student, and a different homework copy for each
  • Group work, paper labs, and games
  • A progress dashboard, and a plain page for families

Reel 5 · The weapon

A copier, a stack of paper, and Claude.

Paper Loop is free and open source. It runs inside Claude for Teachers, which is free for verified US K-12 teachers. Students never touch a screen.

  1. 1

    Plan

    Claude plans the lesson and makes the worksheet, with versions for students who need them.

  2. 2

    Print

    On any copier. Students write a class ID number in the boxes, never their name.

  3. 3

    Write

    Students work on paper: no logins, no tabs, no notifications.

  4. 4

    Scan

    The teacher scans the whole stack on the school copier.

  5. 5

    Mark

    Claude reads every answer against the key and writes a comment beside it. Anything it isn't sure of goes to the teacher first.

  6. 6

    Hand back

    Marked pages go back the next day, with go-over slides, a practice sheet for each student, and a page for families.

…and the results plan tomorrow's lesson.

I love the smell of toner in the morning.

Every teacher, 7:15 a.m.

Reel 6 · We the teachers

We are the many. Ed tech is the few.

There are 3.8 million public school teachers in this country.15 We buy the supplies our budgets don't cover. We crowdfund the books our students keep.16 We give up our evenings to the marking. Meanwhile our districts renew subscriptions that mostly go unopened.2

Ed tech isn't our partner. It's the enemy of every budget line that should have paid for a teacher, a tutor, or a book. Squeezing cash-strapped districts for profit is over.

“There isn’t some mountaintop of cognition that the AI does not achieve.”

Bill Gates, to Nilay Patel on The Verge’s Decoder podcast, October 22, 202618

Gates was talking about skilled office work: once AI does it far cheaper, faster and more accurately than people, the scarcity it was priced on is gone, and he told Patel to expect about twenty years of upheaval. Ed tech priced itself on a scarcity too: no teacher can write 900 comments in a night. Now Claude can, on a plan US teachers get free.

Fight capitalism with capitalism.

“People buy good products, they don’t buy bad products.”

Bill Gates, same interview, when Patel asked how anyone checks AI’s work outside math and code18

Nobody has to ban a subscription. When the better product costs almost nothing, districts stop paying for the worse one.

Try it yourself Take the code

Reel 7 · Try it

Don't take my word for it.

Three small demos, running on Paper Loop's own Claude account. Make a worksheet on any school topic, write one answer and watch it get marked, or print a sample, fill it in, and have the whole page marked from a phone photo.

What you type, draw, or photograph goes to Anthropic's API to be read, and this site keeps none of it. To limit the demos, the site counts them by a scrambled form of your internet address and wipes the counts every night. Cloudflare, which hosts the site and runs the bot check when there is one, keeps its own short-term server records.

Credits · Who built it

I taught 8th-grade science at a Title I school in East Oakland.

At Downtown Charter Academy, when the school couldn't find money in time for a science graphic novel, I didn't ask families to pay. I raised $800 from my own network so every 8th grader, about 80 of them, could own a copy and meet the author.16

I'm not against technology. The 74 opened a report on classroom technology with my physics unit, where students learned about gravity and orbits by launching rockets in a video game.17 I'm against renting the basics back to schools every year.

Paper Loop is free and open source, and it stays that way.

— Ben Adler

The code on GitHub More at badler.ai A sample worksheet to print

Sources

  1. Dewey, Fahle, Kane, Reardon and Staiger, Education Recovery Scorecard, May 2026. Six days per $1,000: 0.03 grade levels, 2022–25. The tutoring comparison cites Guryan et al. (2023).
  2. Baker and Gowda, BrightBytes data from 48 districts, in Education Next, 2018: a median of 70% of licenses never used.
  3. Glimpse K12, about 200,000 licenses, in EdWeek Market Brief, 2019: 67% unused.
  4. IXL Math, cluster randomized trial in Holland, Michigan, 2023, summarized by Evidence for ESSA: +0.13 on Star Math, +0.03 on the state test (not significant).
  5. Pane, Doss, Todd and Seaman, Efficacy of Zearn Math over two years, RAND, 2025: +0.07 on the Texas state test (not significant), +0.11 on MAP.
  6. Learning Heroes and Gallup, 2023, reported by Fortune.
  7. Yang et al., Testing (quizzing) boosts classroom learning, Psychological Bulletin, 2021.
  8. Wisniewski, Zierer and Hattie, The power of feedback revisited, Frontiers in Psychology, 2020: d = 0.48 overall, 0.99 for high-information feedback.
  9. Butler, Enhancing and undermining intrinsic motivation, British Journal of Educational Psychology, 1988.
  10. Roschelle et al., Online mathematics homework increases student achievement, AERA Open, 2016 (ASSISTments).
  11. Delgado et al., Don't throw away your printed books, Educational Research Review, 2018.
  12. Bergman and Chan, Leveraging parents through low-cost technology, Journal of Human Resources, 2021.
  13. On the law's effects: Economics of Education Review, 2024; on the third-grade gate, The 74.
  14. Urban Institute's demographically adjusted rankings, reported by The Week. Some of the gains began before the law (Mississippi Free Press).
  15. Pew Research Center, Key facts about public school teachers in the U.S., 2024.
  16. Callie Rhoades, Local ecologist's graphic novel comes to life for East Oakland middle schoolers, The Oaklandside, April 25, 2024.
  17. Conor P. Williams, The pandemic's virtual learning is now a permanent fixture of America's schools, The 74, May 1, 2023.
  18. Nilay Patel, Bill Gates says to prepare for 20 years of ‘tumultuous’ AI disruption, Decoder, The Verge, October 22, 2026.