← All work · 2013 · EdTech
PlagiarismDetect: a free alternative to Turnitin
A free, web-based plagiarism-detection tool that grew to 200,000+ users worldwide — built on Python, FastAPI, and React.
About the project
Turnitin is expensive. PlagiarismDetect set out to be the version a student could just use — free, web-based, fast, and honest about what it could and couldn't catch. The crawler, the comparison engine, and the report UI were all built in-house. It found its audience without paid acquisition.
Challenge
Run a plagiarism-detection service at zero price-point that still produced results worth reading. Infrastructure cost, comparison-corpus quality, and a UX that taught students what the result meant — all on free-tier economics.
Solution
- 01Built the comparison engine in Python with FastAPI surfacing the API
- 02Built the React front end around the result, not the form
- 03Designed the report UX to make matches inspectable, not just scored
- 04Tuned crawling and corpus to balance coverage against infrastructure cost
Results
- →Grew to 200,000+ users worldwide without paid acquisition
- →Sustained as a free alternative in a market dominated by paid incumbents
- →Built a comparison engine and report UX that aged well past the original stack
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