Spaced-repetition review for the words you actually meet

Spaced repetition is the most reliable way to remember more in less time: instead of cramming, you meet each word again at widening intervals, right at the edge of forgetting. The catch has always been card creation. Sitting down to type out words, definitions, and example sentences is the chore that quietly kills most people's review habit before it starts.

Capecho removes that step entirely. Every word you capture while reading is already a review card, complete with the sentence you met it in and a free explanation of what it means. There is no manual card-building, no formatting, no separate authoring session — the words arrive ready to review.

A few cards while the kettle boils. A minute before a meeting starts. Micro-learning works because it lowers the cost of starting to almost nothing — and a review you'll actually begin beats a thorough study block you keep postponing. The hard part of remembering vocabulary was never the effort of any single review; it was the consistency, and short sessions are what make consistency survivable.

Memory fades on a curve, and the way to interrupt that curve is to meet a word again just before it slips — not to grind it twenty times in one sitting. Cramming feels productive and decays fast; brief reviews spread across days are what move a word into long-term memory. The spacing is doing the work, not the duration.

Capecho schedules reviews with FSRS, a modern spaced-repetition algorithm that models how memory actually decays. After each card you rate it Forget, Hard, Good, or Easy, and FSRS uses that signal to predict when you would next be on the verge of forgetting — then surfaces the word just before that point. Words you find hard come back sooner; words you know well drift further out, so your time lands where it does the most good.

The scheduling is server-authoritative, which means a single source of truth governs when every word is due. As your library follows you across devices, the timing stays consistent rather than drifting out of sync.

Micro-learning only works if there's zero setup — the instant a review turns into a chore, the small gap closes and you reach for your phone instead. The friction can't live at the start of the session.

In Capecho there is no setup, because every card was already built when you captured the word. Each one carries the exact sentence you met it in, with the word highlighted, plus its free explanation — core meaning, part of speech, distinct senses, and pronunciation. Nothing to format, no deck to assemble; you open it and the words that are due are simply there, fronted by the context that makes them recallable.

Here's the whole loop of one review: a card shows your sentence with the new word highlighted, you try to recall what it means, then you rate how it went — Forget, Hard, Good, or Easy. That's it. The whole thing takes seconds, and because the card starts from real context, you're practicing recognition the way you'll actually meet the word again.

Your rating feeds the schedule. Words you find shaky come back soon; words you know well drift further out and stop taking your time. The system spends your minutes on the words that need them, which is what keeps a short vocabulary review genuinely short.

The whole loop lives on your Mac. You capture words from whatever you are reading, Capecho explains and saves them, and the same app brings them back as FSRS reviews when they come due — capture and review in one place, no second device required to get value today.

A phone review companion is now on the App Store too, built for exactly those in-between minutes — the commute, the queue, the minute before bed — when you'd otherwise be scrolling. Your words and review history already sync to the cloud, so the queue you've been building on the Mac is there waiting on your iPhone, due dates intact, with nothing to migrate or rebuild.

The core loop is free and unmetered: capture, unlimited saving, the full word explanation, your Word Book, and FSRS review all cost nothing, with no subscription on the core loop — Pro is the optional upgrade for unlimited in-context. The one metered piece on Free is the optional in-context explanation — the word as used in your sentence — free up to ten a day, and reaching that limit never blocks a single review.

And none of it locks you in. Capecho is a complement to the spaced-repetition tools you may already love, not a wall around your words; export to Anki or CSV anytime. Built first for English and never English-only, it exists to make the remembering as light as the reading — a few words, in a few minutes, whenever you have them.