Litero

Litero is positioning itself as the ethical alternative in the AI writing space, which I respect — it actually detects AI-generated content so you can't cheat, rather than just pumping out essay mill garbage. The 100M+ academic sources and built-in citation formatting actually solve real pain points for students drowning in research, and at $7.90/month it's cheaper than most textbook rentals. The Harvard, Oregon, and Michigan mentions are giving signal, though 36 followers and 78 upvotes on Product Hunt tells me they're still early — but that's not a bad thing when you're actually building something useful for a specific crowd instead of chasing general productivity trends.