The fine print
Your file is too big.
This is a money problem.
Recall caps uploads at 5MB. Not for any clever engineering reason. The entire thing runs on free tiers, and the free tiers have opinions about how much of your Operating Systems reviewer they are willing to hold.
The developer is a computer science student. The budget for this project is whatever was left after lunch.
Monthly infrastructure spend
| Service | Cost | |
|---|---|---|
| Supabase | Stores your notes and the vectors | ₱0.00 |
| Groq | Writes the actual answers | ₱0.00 |
| Jina AI | Turns your notes into embeddings | ₱0.00 |
| Vercel | Serves this page to you | ₱0.00 |
| Total | Suspiciously sustainable | ₱0.00 |
What Recall will actually take
- 15MB per file. Roughly a 200 page PDF of plain text, or about 30 pages if your professor exported every slide as an image.
- 2.pdf, .md and .txt only. Not .docx, not .pptx, and definitely not a photo of the whiteboard.
- 3Big PDFs take a while. Anything over about 500KB gets chunked and embedded one piece at a time. Leave the tab open. Go get coffee.
- 4Scanned notes will not work. If the text is not selectable in a PDF reader, Recall sees a blank page. There is no OCR, because OCR is not free.
How to get under the cap
- +Split it. Upload chapters separately. This is better anyway, because you can then ask one chapter at a time instead of searching the whole semester.
- +Compress it. Most of the weight in a lecture PDF is images you do not need. Any "compress PDF" tool will drop it by half.
- +Export to text. If it started as a Google Doc or Word file, save it as .txt or .md. A 12MB .docx becomes about 80KB of plain text, and Recall reads it faster.
One honest warning
Free tiers can rate limit, sleep, or fall over on a busy day, usually the night before an exam, which is statistically the only time anyone uses a study app. Keep your original files. Recall is a way to ask your notes questions, not a place to store them.
Still want to try it?
Bring a file under 5MB and it will work exactly as advertised.
Built by one student, hosted on nothing, held together by free tiers