Y Combinator vs alphaXiv
Price, ratings, monetisation and update history for both apps, side by side — with what reviewers say about each.
Y Combinator
Access Y Combinator's extensive library of startup content, including YouTube videos, podcasts, and essays. It also serves as a mobile client for Hacker News, offering the latest startup news for founders and programmers. Additional features are available for YC-funded founders.
- Organized YC YouTube videos
- Startup School content
- On-the-go podcast listening
- Hacker News mobile client
- YC founder-only knowledge base
- Access Bookface feed and messages
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The Y Combinator App is your home for all things YC. It organizes all of YC's YouTube videos, podcasts, and essays. It's also a mobile client for Hacker News, the best startup news source for programmers and technical founders. For founders who have been funded by YC, it has additional features. For everyone: - Organizes all of YC's YouTube videos - the world's best content on startups - All of the content from Startup School - Listen to YC podcasts on the go - Read Hacker News - the best news source for programmers and technical founders For YC founders: - Access the Bookface feed - Access Bookface messages - Read the YC founder-only knowledge base
alphaXiv
This app helps researchers stay updated with the latest AI studies from arXiv. It offers AI-powered summaries, literature reviews, and visual explanations of complex papers. Users can also annotate papers and track their research interests.
- Trending research feed
- AI-powered literature reviews
- Interactive paper reader with notes
- AI Visual Blogs for paper explanations
- Personalized research recommendations
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alphaXiv offers a suite of AI features built on top of arXiv that help you keep up with and quickly understand the latest research. Trending Feed Discover the most relevant AI research, curated by our community of hundreds of thousands of readers each week. See papers tailored to your specific research interests with quick informative blurbs to help you decide which papers to delve deeper. Library Bookmark favorite papers, keep track of your research and organize your work. Paper is missing on alphaXiv? Upload it into library and gain access to the same assistant and AI Overviews as the publically available papers. AI Assistant Understand the latest AI research with AI. Ask questions like 'What are the latest breakthroughs in RL fine-tuning?' and get comprehensive literature reviews with trending papers automatically included. Paper Reader View papers with highlights, personal notes, and quick access to our AI assistant. Come back anytime to a paper to see what parts you marked as important, any notes that you left for yourself, and your conversations with our assistant. AI Visual Blogs Turn any complex paper into clear visual explanations. Generate beautiful research blogs with figures, equations, and key insights from the paper with just one click. Join hundreds of thousands of weekly readers on alphaXiv to transform your research output. Whether you’re a curious undergrad or an applied research scientist, reading papers won’t ever feel the same again.
Screenshots
Verdict
The clearest difference is review sentiment: alphaXiv at 100% against Y Combinator's 50%. alphaXiv also leads on rating (4.7 vs 4.3) and update cadence (every 4 days vs every 3 weeks). On price, ratings volume, ads and in-app purchases there is nothing between them.
Scored on Price · Rating · Positive reviews · Number of ratings · Update frequency · Ads · In-app purchases · Monetization · Best chart rank · Devices · Requires iOS
Both are free to download. Neither carries in-app purchases, so what you see is what you pay.
alphaXiv holds the better App Store score, 4.7 against 4.3. Both are backed by a comparable volume of ratings — 26 and 17 respectively. Written reviews point the same way: 50% of Y Combinator's written reviews are positive against 100% of alphaXiv's.
Y Combinator ships an update every 3 weeks, alphaXiv every 4 days. The most recent releases landed on September 18, 2026 and September 14, 2026 respectively.
| Parameter | Y Combinator | alphaXiv |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Free | Free |
| Rating | 4.3 (26 ratings) | 4.7 (17 ratings) — better |
| Positive reviews | 50.0% of reviews | 100.0% of reviews — better |
| Number of ratings | 26 — better | 17 |
| Update frequency | Every 3 weeks | Every 4 days — better |
| Ads | No | No |
| In-app purchases | No | No |
| Monetization | Free | Free |
| Devices | iPhone, iPad | iPhone, iPad |
| Requires iOS | 16.4 — better | 17.0 |
| Further details — not scored | ||
| Size | 84 MB | 73 MB |
| Age rating | 4+ | 12+ |
| Developer | Y Combinator | alphaXiv Inc. |
Customer experience
Y Combinator
alphaXiv
In-app purchases
Y Combinator
No in-app purchases
alphaXiv
No in-app purchases
