Why I'm building this
I'm David. I'm a graduate student in an applied behavior analysis program, US-based, and I'm changing careers. Before grad school I was a software engineer for over ten years.
My wife is a BCBA: five years certified, five more as an RBT before that. Watching her work for a decade (the casework, the supervision, the way she thinks about people and behavior) is what convinced me to make this switch. The career change is partly her doing, in the best way.
The way ABA Mastery comes together is a kind of parallel dance. I'm the student going through the coursework for the first time: learning what's actually hard, noticing where existing materials fall short, and building what I wish existed as I go. She's the seasoned clinician who reads what I write and tells me when an explanation is right, wrong, or oversimplified. Lessons, wrong-answer rationales, quiz items: they all get checked against her decade of practice before they ship.
The behavior analysis side is where I'm a beginner. I'm learning the material at the same time as the people who'll use this app. That's deliberate. Every wrong-answer explanation I write makes my own preparation a little stronger, and the bar for whether an explanation is good enough is whether I learn something writing it.
The math on study materials never quite added up for me. Five hundred dollars for a question bank. Three hundred more for a mock exam. Forty for a flashcard deck someone else made. After staring at the spread, I figured: if I'm putting hundreds of hours into mastering this material anyway, I might as well build the tool I wished existed, and share it with everyone else going through the same transition.
Where this is right now
ABA Mastery is in early access. Every lesson is free for everyone, forever. That's the part of the app that should be open, because reading is how people learn the material and decide whether they trust the rest. The free tier also includes a curated set of real practice questions spanning every part of the exam (not just one or two domains) so anyone can drill the actual bank, with the same explanations paid users get, plus one full mock exam. Pro and Lifetime unlock the complete question bank across all nine domains, unlimited mock exams, the AI tutor, the fieldwork tracker, and analytics. The math on those tiers funds the API costs, the hosting, and the time I'm putting into shipping new content.
When I'm confident this would have gotten me to my own pass, I'll open it up wider still. For now I'm shipping fast, fixing fast, and reading every piece of feedback that comes in.
Why there's a generous free tier
A thousand honest hours of feedback from real candidates is worth more to me than $500 from a hundred of them. Lessons are free for everyone. The BACB Task List isn't proprietary and the teaching shouldn't be either. Free-tier practice spans every part of the exam (a curated slice of the real bank, with the real explanations) and you can drill it as much as you want before you pay. You get that slice all at once: no drip-feeding, no daily limits.
What this is not
I'm not a BCBA yet. I'm a candidate, learning alongside everyone who uses this. I'm not pretending to be an expert. Every question, every explanation, every flashcard is grounded in Cooper, Heron & Heward and the BACB Ethics Code, the same sources we all study from. If I get something wrong, I want to hear about it.
ABA Mastery is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by the Behavior Analyst Certification Board (BACB). References to the 6th Edition Test Content Outline and the Ethics Code are for educational purposes; they're the standards we all study from, but they're the BACB's work, not mine.
About the school I'm in
I'm intentionally not naming my program while I'm still a student. I want the work to stand on its own merits, and I'd rather not have anything I build here complicate my standing with the people teaching me. Once I'm graduated and certified, I'll happily put my name and program here, and probably write something about what actually worked.
Get in touch
Email me at hello@abamastery.app. A real person reads every message: me. Reply might be slow during exam crunch, but it comes.