ImtehanHub — a project by Ahsan Mahmood
Bilingual Urdu and English exam preparation, Class 5 to FA/FSc.
The row calls the worst part of exam preparation by its own name. Test section hell.
The test section at the back of a textbook is finite, and the questions in it repeat. Work through it twice and you have stopped practising, because what you are now remembering is which answer sat in which position rather than why it was the right one.
ImtehanHub generates rather than lists.
Practice tests are chapter-wise and non-repeating, covering multiple choice as well as short and long questions. The supply does not run out.
Then the part that matters more than the supply.
Every answer links back to the exact page of the textbook it came from. A student can check the platform instead of trusting it.
Checking is the feature.
The whole thing is bilingual end to end, Urdu and English, with right-to-left layout on the Urdu side. Right-to-left is the honest test of a translation layer, because it moves the layout rather than only the words.
It covers Class 5 through 2nd Year, FA and FSc.
A question bank one person writes is a question bank that stays small, so there is a contribution system underneath the test engine and the students are the contributors.
Submissions sit behind CNIC verification.
Peer voting surfaces the good questions, flagging catches the bad ones, moderator queues hold everything in between, and a strikes and bans system exists for accounts that keep getting it wrong. There are 25 achievements over the top.
Moderation is not a feature that ships and then sits quietly. Somebody reads those queues, and the design assumes that somebody is one person.
That identity gate is friction on purpose.
Asking for a national identity number before somebody may contribute a question will lose contributions, and it is still the cheapest thing that keeps a public question bank usable once the internet finds it. What happens to that number afterwards is not something this page describes, because the record these pages are written from does not say.
Growth is engineered rather than hoped for.
Every sign-up carries UTM and source attribution, so where a student arrived from is a fact rather than a guess, and 3 successful referrals upgrade an account to Pro automatically.
The constraint under all of it is a strict free-tier Firebase architecture with no Cloud Functions.
A free tier is a ceiling. It is not the absence of one.
I learned that here. The platform went down because a free-tier read quota ran out, and it stayed down for every real user until the quota reset. Nothing was broken. The queries were reading more than they needed, and a limit nobody had written was reached by a number nobody was watching.
Every list query I have written since carries an explicit limit, and the database does the filtering and counting rather than the browser.
Per-route static HTML and JSON-LD are emitted for crawlers that do not run JavaScript. A study platform nobody can find is a study platform nobody uses.
What it cost is advertising.
It is free for students because AdSense pays for the web and AdMob pays for mobile, and Pro removes them. A student who cannot pay sees advertising, and a student who can, or who brings three friends, does not.
That is a trade rather than a gift, and it reads better stated here than discovered later by a student who had assumed the platform was funded by something else.
It is also in progress rather than finished.
It is at imtehanhub.aoneahsan.com, with documentation at imtehanhub-docs.aoneahsan.com.
Bilingual means every question, every screen and every mistake has to be right twice.
What it does, and what that costs to build
- Non-repeating chapter-wise test engine (MCQ/short/long)
- Book-page reference on every question
- Bilingual Urdu (RTL) + English
- Community module (CNIC verification, voting, moderation)
- Referral-driven auto-Pro + UTM attribution
- Per-route static HTML + JSON-LD for AI crawlers
- AdMob + AdSense (ad-free for Pro)
Built with
- React 19
- TypeScript
- Vite 8
- TailwindCSS
- Radix UI
- TanStack Query
- Firebase
- CapacitorJS
Worth knowing
- education
- exam-prep
- pakistan
- bilingual
- react
- firebase
Who built ImtehanHub?
Ahsan Mahmood built it on his own, and it runs at imtehanhub.aoneahsan.com with documentation at imtehanhub-docs.aoneahsan.com. The test engine, the bilingual layer with its right-to-left Urdu side, the contribution and moderation system, the Firestore rules and the crawler-facing static pages are one person's work. It is React and TypeScript on Vite, with Tailwind and Radix UI on the interface, TanStack Query over the data and Firebase underneath, packaged with Capacitor for mobile.
Is ImtehanHub free for students?
Yes, and it is paid for by advertising rather than by the student. AdSense funds the web side and AdMob funds mobile, with a Pro tier that removes the advertising for anyone who would rather not see it. There is also a route to Pro that costs nothing: 3 successful referrals upgrade an account automatically. The arrangement is deliberate, because a paywall in front of exam practice would exclude precisely the students the platform exists for, and someone still has to pay for the platform.
Why does every answer point back to a textbook page?
So a student can check it instead of believing it. A practice platform that gets an answer wrong and cannot be audited is worse than no platform, because a confidently wrong answer gets memorised along with the right ones. Tying each answer to the exact page of the book it came from turns the platform into an index over material the student already trusts, rather than a second source they now have to reconcile with the first. It also makes a bad contributed question visible quickly, which matters once the question bank accepts submissions.
Who is allowed to add questions?
Verified contributors, behind a CNIC gate. Submissions are checked by peer voting, flagged by other users when something is wrong, held in moderator queues, and backed by a strikes and bans system for accounts that keep submitting badly. That identity gate is real friction and it will cost the platform contributions, which is the trade being made on purpose: a public question bank with no barrier to entry fills up with noise faster than moderators can clear it. What happens to that identity number afterwards is not described here, because the record these pages are written from does not say.
Does ImtehanHub work on iPhone?
No, there is no iOS build and there will not be one from here, because there is no Apple Developer account behind this work. ImtehanHub is a web application any phone can open in a browser, and its codebase is packaged with Capacitor for mobile with AdMob on that side. The only link this page will point you at is the web one at imtehanhub.aoneahsan.com, because that is the link the record carries. Nothing here has ever been submitted to the App Store.
https://aoneahsan.com/projects/com.aoneahsan.imtehanhub