Aimchess Review

Aimchess is worth trying on its free plan if you play regularly online, because it analyses your own games and builds practice from your mistakes rather than teaching a course. Whether Premium is worth paying for is less clear: its vendor page listed $7.99 a month on 8 November 2026, the App Store shows more, and the headline research claim on its homepage, which is the seller's own claim, could not be traced to a published study. Pay only once the free report has shown you something you would act on.

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Test depth: Public information only. Nobody at ChessCourseFinder has used this paid plan. This review is based on published documentation, pricing and reports: Aimchess's homepage and its App Store listing, read on 8 November 2026. We cannot say how good its analysis is, and we have not run it on any set of games. How we review explains the limits.

This review has no star score. Fit, price and limits are set out instead, and how reviews are made is public.

What Aimchess does

Aimchess describes itself as analysing your recent games across six areas and comparing you with players of your rating, then building puzzles from your mistakes alongside lessons it says were created by grandmasters and coaches. It works with Chess.com and Lichess accounts, and the page also names Chess24. The text we read does not say which rating scale the comparison uses. Because there is no fixed curriculum, what you get depends entirely on the games you feed it.

Aimchess's FAQ draws the distinction from an engine this way: an engine judges individual moves, while it says its technology analyses games "in aggregate" to give guidance you can apply generally. Here is what each of the six areas asks, per the homepage, and how you could sanity-check it yourself.

The right-hand column is our suggestion, not an Aimchess feature. If a report's weakest area matches what you find by hand, it has told you something usable. If it does not, that is a reason not to pay.

The training modes it lists

The homepage names these drills: Advantage Capitalization Trainer, Opening Improver, Practice Visualization, Blunder Preventer (choose which of two moves is the blunder), 360 Trainer, Intuition Trainer (find the mistake in a sequence of moves), Tactics, Retry Mistakes, Endgame, Defender, Time Trainer, Blindfold Tactics and Checkmate Patterns flashcards. Several are built from your own games and several are general. Which of them count as "Premium lessons" is not itemised on the page.

Free versus Premium

The two plans differ more on depth and volume than on the idea, per the vendor's page on 8 November 2026.

At 40 games a month, a player would need 25 months to accumulate 1000 games (calculated), so the "last 1000 games" feature mainly helps if you have a long history or play a lot. The FAQ explains the paywall by saying that high-depth engine analysis of all your games costs money to run.

What it costs, and the price conflict

The figures disagree depending on where you look, as of 8 November 2026:

The homepage shows "$" without naming the currency, and its footer reads "Copyright 2021", so it may not have been fully refreshed. A World Chess roundup also reports $7.99 and $57.99, which supports the figures but cannot tell us they are current. We lead with the vendor's figures because they are the seller's own, but you should confirm them at checkout.

Calculated from the vendor's numbers, twelve months of monthly billing is $95.88, so the annual option saves $37.89. It breaks even after about 7.3 months ($57.99 divided by $7.99); on App Store prices the figure is about 7.2 months. So buy annual only if you are confident you will still be using it after eight months, and start monthly otherwise. The page's "$4.85 a month" does not exactly equal $57.99 divided by 12 (about $4.83), so rely on the billed total.

On iOS, the listing says the subscription is paid from your iTunes account and renews automatically every 30 days.

The "31% faster" claim

The homepage states that "Aimchess personalized puzzles increase your rating 31% faster than standard tactics puzzles", citing "a 12 week randomized field experiment conducted by researchers at the University of British Columbia". This is a seller claim about a rating gain, and we do not repeat it as fact.

A web search on 8 November 2026 did not find a published paper, authors or journal for this study, only a newsletter repeating the claim without a citation. One search cannot prove that no paper exists. The homepage gives no sample size, no rating range, no definition of "faster", and no statement of who funded or ran the work beyond the university's name. Personalised practice is a plausible idea, but a randomized trial only tells you something once you can read its method. If you want to weigh the claim, ask Aimchess for the paper.

What the seller's pages do not tell you

• The App Store prices are higher than the vendor's. $9.99 against $7.99 monthly is 25% more, and $71.99 against $57.99 annually is 24% more (both calculated). If you subscribe in the app, you may pay the higher figure, though we could not confirm what the app charges.
• The free plan is described differently in the two places. The vendor lists one 40-game report a month and one daily training session. The App Store describes the free tier as 15 lessons a day and limited access to scouting reports and statistics.
• How the diagnoses are checked. The homepage reports no accuracy figure, so whether a "time management" label matches what a human coach would say is not something the page lets you verify.
• How current the service is. The App Store's latest version history entry we read is 1.3.1, dated 28 June 2024, and its copyright line is 2024. That is an observation about the listing and does not show whether the web product has changed since.
• Refund terms. A terms PDF is linked from the homepage, but we could not extract readable text from it, so we cannot tell you what it says. Read it before paying, or ask Aimchess support.

Who owns it

The App Store lists the developer and seller as Chess.com, LLC and the copyright line as "Aimchess by PMG", while the homepage footer names Coachevnik. We did not read a source on the company's ownership history, so we say nothing further. It is worth knowing if you are comparing it with Chess.com's own Insights as an independent second opinion.

Who it suits

• Someone who plays regularly on Chess.com or Lichess and wants a report on their own games. The free report is a no-cost way to see its categories.
• Someone who wants practice aimed at their own mistakes rather than generic puzzles. Analysing your own games is received wisdom among coaches, and an IM coach in a Chess.com forum thread told an adult improver to start there. That supports the idea, not Aimchess's execution of it.
• A coach preparing lessons. The homepage markets this use, and quotes one grandmaster who says so. A testimonial is not evidence.

Who should skip this

• You play few online games. Forty games a month is the free report's size, so if you play fewer than that, Premium's main gain would be depth and more training rather than more of your own games. Over-the-board games are not mentioned on the page.
• You want a structured curriculum. See ChessMood for a catalogue with stated levels, or our Chessable review for drilling.
• You are already on Chess.com Diamond, which per Chess.com's membership article includes Insights and coach explanations on all moves. Compare on Aimchess vs Chess.com Insights and in our Chess.com Premium review.
• You will not act on a report. Knowing your weakest area changes nothing until you spend study time on it.

The free resources that cover similar ground

Aimchess's own free Standard plan is the nearest free option. Beyond it, Chess.com's free Basic tier includes one full game review a day, per the same membership article, and Lichess has a free puzzle trainer and Practice sections; see Lichess studies and practice. None of these builds practice from your own mistakes in the way Aimchess describes, as far as the pages we read say, and we have not compared their output. The table above is also free: an evening with your last ten games and a notebook covers the same six questions, without the peer comparison.

What others say

The independent material is sparse. A Chess.com member blog, "Aimchess: A Review", which we saw only in a search listing, reportedly calls the price fair and wishes for more access to drills. A forum thread titled "Aimchess or Chessable" exists, but we have not read it. The App Store listing showed 197 ratings averaging 3.9 out of 5, and the review it displays calls the app "plenty worth the subscription"; the listing chooses what it displays and one review is an anecdote. No detailed, recent independent review turned up, and we found no critical one, which may reflect how little there is rather than how good the product is.

Before you pay

1. Start on the Standard plan and read one report.
2. Compare its weakest area with your own count from the table above.
3. Run the free daily session for two weeks and note whether you actually open it.
4. Check the price in the app or website where you will buy, and the currency.
5. Pay monthly first, and set a cancel reminder.