If your question is not below, write to [email protected] and we will add the answer (and write back). Real Indian aspirants, real Indian email replies.
The backtest is fully reproducible. Every Current Affairs question from the 2021–2026 UPSC Prelims papers is listed by year on our backtest pages, with the PIB source release one click away on the official pib.gov.in site. You can verify any row, in under a minute, on your own.
We also publish the cases where the engine fails — 2025 is our weakest cohort (29% P@10) and we lead with that, not bury it. The Verification Sheet PDF is the long-form audit trail; sit with it for an hour and find something we got wrong, then write to us. We update in public.
Because the weighting is the product. If we hand it over in a PDF, every coaching institute clones it in a weekend, every aspirant doubts our reasons for charging ₹599, and our subscribers lose the advantage they paid for. What we are willing to do — and what the backtest demonstrates — is publish the outputs: every rank we assign, every week we score, every UPSC question we did or did not catch.
See the full reasoning on the methodology page.
Three differences worth noting, in order of importance:
1. Backtest published. No coaching institute we know of publishes a question-by-question backtest of their CA digest against past UPSC papers. We do (backtest/). You can audit our claims; you cannot audit theirs.
2. Daily, not monthly. Most coaching CA digests are monthly PDFs. We post a Top 10 at 10 PM every night, plus a Sunday digest, plus the monthly PDF, plus the yearly booklet. Daily cadence catches the time-sensitive releases that monthly PDFs miss.
3. ₹599/year vs ₹4,000–8,000/year. The comparable products from large coaching brands run ₹4,000–₹8,000. Our price is honest because our overheads are honest — two people, no offices.
It would, if there was no human editor. There is. Umang Sultania reviews every daily Top 10 between 9 and 9:45 PM IST before the list goes live at 10. The scoring is layered judgment, not a formula; the editorial review catches cases where the score is high but substance is thin, and cases where the score is low but substance is exam-grade. Roughly one or two slots in every Top 10 are an editor override. The scoring narrows 1,000 weekly releases to 50–80 candidates; the human picks the final ten.
We also do not use the term "AI" anywhere on this site, because the work is more like editorial judgment than autonomous machine output. The bench is calibrated by Aditya Tiwari Sir since 2018 and reviewed by Umang since 2025.
Monday to Saturday, 10:00 PM IST — Today's Top 10. Emailed at 10:05 PM if you've opted in, otherwise on the web at /feed. About 12 minutes to read.
Sunday, 10:00 PM IST — Weekly digest. ~32 min read. 25 picks organised by theme, editor's letter at the top, trap-watch consolidation, blind-spot reading list, email-replica preview if you want a printable version. See last week's →
1st of every month — Monthly compilation. PDF, ~16 pages packed with ~130 release boxes in a 2-column layout. Theme-organised. Print it, mark it. See February 2026 →
Every March — Pre-Prelims yearly booklet. ~76 pages, ~1,180 release boxes. For the May Prelims paper. See the 2026 edition →
Nothing gets lost. Every release we score stays in the searchable index at /search for the full year — and the weekly digest re-surfaces the week's important picks. The daily feed is the forward-cadence version; the searchable index is the back-archive. Most subscribers use both.
Not yet. The daily feed, weekly digest, monthly PDF, and yearly booklet are all in English. We score against PIB's English-language edition because that is what subscribers told us they read for UPSC prep. A Hindi version is on the roadmap for 2027 if subscriber demand justifies the editorial effort (which essentially means hiring a second editor) — write to us if you'd want it.
Yes. Subscribers can pick up to 5 ministries for a separate 10 PM alert. Useful if you are tracking, say, MEA closely in the last 60 days. Manage in My account → Ministry alerts. The main daily Top 10 still covers all ministries; ministry alerts are an add-on, not a replacement.
No. We score PIB. About a third of UPSC CA questions come from sources outside PIB — RBI Monetary Policy minutes, SEBI consultation papers, SC verdicts, international scientific press, sports federations. pibtracker does not claim to catch those.
What we do, instead, is flag the "blind spot" each week. The daily feed has a "what to chase elsewhere" section; the weekly digest consolidates it; the monthly PDF has a dedicated blind-spot chapter; the yearly booklet has 82 such items listed by topic. Use those flags to know what extra reading is needed beyond what we provide. We will never silently pretend a non-PIB question is in our jurisdiction.
Designed for Prelims Current Affairs. The backtest is against Prelims GS-1 Current Affairs questions. The yearly booklet is the pre-Prelims booklet. Daily, weekly, monthly cadences are tuned for Prelims-pattern recall.
It also helps for Mains — the trap-watch notes, the editorial gloss, the depth-of-coverage treatment is the kind of reading that translates to Mains answer-writing too. But Mains specifically needs practice on answer structure, model answers, and ethics-paper reading, which we do not provide. For Law Optional specifically, see defactolaw.in.
Marginally. The 2027 booklet ships in March 2027, covering May 2026 – April 2027 — that is the document you will want for your prep. If you subscribe before March 2027, the 2027 booklet is included automatically (no extra charge). Subscribers active in March 2026 already received the 2026 booklet; subscribers joining now get archive access including the 2026 edition for context, plus the 2027 edition when it ships.
₹599 a year is roughly ₹50 a month, or one cup of office coffee per month. It is enough because we are two people without offices. The comparable products from large coaching brands run ₹4,000–₹8,000 a year — those prices reflect their cost structures (faculty hierarchies, offline centres, sales teams), not the underlying editorial work. We don't have those costs, so we don't charge for them.
If after 30 days you decide the product is not worth ₹599, write to [email protected] and we refund the full amount. No forms. See the refund policy.
Razorpay handles payments. UPI (most subscribers use UPI), credit and debit cards, net banking — all the usual Indian payment methods. GST-compliant invoice generated automatically. If you need to add your GSTIN for company-paid subscriptions, you can do so at conversion.
Yes. From My account, any time, no calls and no forms. If you cancel during the first 30 days of paying, we refund in full. After 30 days the subscription is not refundable, but you can cancel renewal so you are not billed the following year.
Yes, for 10+ seats. Write to [email protected] with the batch size and we'll send you a flat batch quote and a single invoice. Coaching institutes that want to use pibtracker as their CA layer for their own students are welcome.
Aditya Tiwari Sir is the founder of De Facto IAS and a Law Optional / GS-2 faculty since 2018. The "Current Developments in Law" weekly email he has been sending his Law Optional batches since 2018 is the prototype for pibtracker — the filter that became the engine.
Umang is the quality lead. He reached the UPSC personality interview twice and reviews every daily Top 10 between 9 and 9:45 PM IST before it goes live at 10 PM. He joined in early 2025 and is the human override layer on the scoring engine.
Honest answer — the product is built around the editorial judgment of Aditya Tiwari Sir and Umang, and we are not pretending otherwise. If either of them stops, the engine continues but the human review layer would need a new person, and we would tell subscribers immediately rather than hide it. We would also pro-rate refunds if a subscriber decided to leave over the change. We are running this small, not as a venture-funded operation, so continuity depends on two people staying engaged with it — and both have been on the editorial side for years before this product existed.
Write to [email protected]. We read every email. The reply comes from a person, usually within a day. For Law Optional coaching enquiries specifically, that email also reaches the De Facto IAS office.
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