Worksheet Boss

A web app for teachers: type a topic, pick a grade, subject and question style, and get a print-ready worksheet with an answer key, as PDF or Word. I started it in 2023 on GPT-3.5; it now runs on Gemini behind a Cloud Function, with Stripe plans and monthly limits enforced on the server.

I started WorksheetWizard in May 2023, a few months after ChatGPT arrived, to save teachers the job of hand-making worksheets. The first version was a Firebase-hosted site on a Bootstrap template: a form for topic, grade, subject, question type, difficulty and count, a call to OpenAI's gpt-3.5-turbo, and the result rendered as a worksheet you could download as a Word file. Within two weeks it had Google sign-in, plan tiers and a new name, SheetBoss.

Through summer 2023 it grew a saved-worksheet collection, a gallery for teachers' uploads, a Stripe payment page, dark mode, monthly usage resets and a new worksheet template. In November 2024 I moved generation from OpenAI to Google's Gemini with a reworked prompt. In 2026 I rewrote the whole site as Worksheet Boss, dropping the template, jQuery and Bootstrap for a small hand-written 'paper and ink' design system: cream paper, a teacher's red-pen accent and ruled-line blue.

The biggest change is where the trust boundary sits. The 2023 site called the AI and checked usage limits from the browser, which anyone could bypass. Now the studio calls /api/generate, which Firebase Hosting rewrites to a Cloud Function. It verifies the user's Firebase ID token, checks the request origin, reserves one generation atomically against the monthly limit for the user's tier, and calls Gemini with a key held in Secret Manager. Tiers are read-only to clients and set by a function that watches Stripe subscription records.

The model returns structured JSON against a schema for ten question types, and the browser renders it as a printable sheet with answer bubbles, matching columns and writing lines. The rewrite is live at worksheetboss.com with a free tier and three paid tiers. Its source sits on a snapshot branch recovered from the SSD in November 2026; the main branch still holds the 2023 to 2024 version.