The Last Minute Lecture Website Is Closing

The Last Minute Lecture Website Is Closing

We have some difficult news, and we would rather you hear it from us than find a closed website one day.

Last Minute Lecture is shutting down at the end of August 2026 — and the chapter audio is moving to YouTube, free.

What we set out to do

We built this to make hard material easier to actually understand. Not summaries that skip the difficult parts, but chapter-by-chapter audio you could listen to on the bus, at the gym, or the night before an exam when reading the whole textbook again was never going to happen. Something you could put on to refresh what you had already studied, or to finally make a chapter click.

Watching it genuinely help people get through their exams has meant everything to us.

Why we are stopping

Two things brought us here.

We are not able to keep adding new textbooks to the library. Growing it takes far more time than we can give it, and without that growth the site stops being what it was meant to be.

And funding it is not sustainable. Even with our supporters' donations — which kept this alive far longer than it would have lasted otherwise — the site has lost money every single month. We are financially struggling students ourselves, and we would rather be honest about that than keep taking monthly payments for something we simply cannot keep expanding.

Between those two things, we had to make a hard decision. So for now, we have to let go of the long-term goals we had for this project.

Did the website itself help you?

Before we close, there is one thing we would genuinely like to know.

The audio is staying on YouTube — so if that is the part you used, you are covered. But if it was the website itself that made this work for you — the word-synced transcripts, Study Mode, offline listening, searching across every book — we would really like to hear it, and how you used it.

There is a message box at the bottom of this page — tell us there, or email us. If YouTube covers what you need, that is genuinely useful to know too. Either answer helps us understand what actually mattered here.

The chapter audio moves to YouTube — and stays free

Our YouTube channel becomes the home for the chapter audio. It stays free, with no account and no payment.

To be straight with you about what does and does not come along: it is the audio itself we are taking with us. YouTube has its own captions, transcripts and auto-translation, and those are genuinely useful — but they come from YouTube, not from us, and they are not the same as the word-synced transcripts, the Spanish editions, or the private podcast feeds we built here. Those are part of the website, and they end with it.

The audio stays available for as long as there are no issues with YouTube's current or future policies. We are not taking it away from you — we are moving it somewhere that can outlive us.

Through August, everything is unlocked

For the rest of the summer, every feature on the site is free for anyone with an account. Study Mode, full transcripts, copying and downloading them, unlimited offline downloads, and the private podcast feed — all of it, for everyone signed in, with no payment and no tier.

If you have exams or finals to get through before September, use it as much as you need.

If you support us monthly

Thank you. Genuinely — you are the reason this lasted as long as it did.

Your final month is honoured in full, and you will not be charged again. We are cancelling the payments ourselves, so there is nothing you need to do. Monthly donations are now closed on the support page. Your access does not end when your subscription does — every account keeps everything until the site closes on August 31st.

If something is wrong with a payment, please come to us before your bank. Email us and we will make it right. A card dispute costs us a fee several times the size of the payment itself, and while we are closing down we do not have the funds to cover those.

One-time gifts remain open until the end of August for anyone who wants to say thank you, but please do not feel any obligation. Nothing on the site is behind a payment any more.

What ends on August 31st

So there are no surprises, here is everything that stops when the site closes:

• The website — chapter pages, search, topics and subjects
• Study Room — saved chapters, notes and listening history
• Study Mode and the word-synced transcripts
• The Spanish and other language editions
• Offline downloads and the installed app
• Private podcast feeds
• Book and translation requests, and voting (already closed)
• Supporter perks and billing — all subscriptions cancelled

If you have notes or saved chapters you want to keep, please copy them out before August 31st. After that we cannot get them back for you.

After August

The site address will keep showing a short notice with a link to the YouTube channel until the end of 2026, so anyone who arrives late still knows where everything went.

One last thing

This was not an easy decision, and we did not come to it quickly. We went back and forth on it for a long time, looking for any version of this that worked — and in the end we could not find one we could honestly sustain.

We are endlessly grateful for the support this community has given us: everyone who used the site, told a classmate about it, sent us a kind email, or requested a book. And especially our subscribers — you chose to put real money behind something you believed in when you did not have to, and you kept this going far longer than it would have lasted otherwise. We will not forget that.

If you have any questions, please ask. There is a message box at the bottom of this page, or you can email us at contact@lastminutelecture.com. We will read and reply to every message.

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This project has been one of the best things we have ever been part of, and that is entirely because of the people who used it. We hope it helped you get through some hard exams. Good luck with the rest of them — and we will see you on YouTube.

Thank you for being a part of the Last Minute Lecture Family!

— The Last Minute Lecture Team