Cathy Parkes Has 842K Subscribers and 63 Products for 1 Exam. Her App Has 26 Ratings

Key Takeaways:

Level Up RN showed 842K subscribers, 2,075 videos and 116,674,407 views on September 15, 2026. Cathy Parkes BSN, RN, CWCN, PHN is a certified wound care nurse in Southern California who started the channel in July 2017 after study sessions for her own ABSN cohort at California State University San Marcos
The leveluprn.com catalog returned 63 products and 70 priced variants on September 15, 2026, from $5.00 to $549.95, at a median price of $49.95. Fifty of the 63 are flashcard decks, flashcard bundles, or review card games
She already did the hard part. Two products, Flashables Essentials and Flashables Accelerate, carry two recurring selling plans each, named "Renews every 30 days" and "Renews every 12 months," with a 20% price adjustment attached to both. List prices are $12.50 and $122.50 for Essentials, $31.25 and $247.50 for Accelerate
The Level Up RN app is free, holds 26 US ratings at 2.7 stars, was released December 19, 2021, and ships under the developer account of Chief Digital Advisors LLC. The listing has no In-App Purchases row at all
A US App Store search for "nclex" on September 15, 2026 returned NCLEX RN Mastery at 31,101 ratings and Archer Review at 22,489. Her app was not in the first 25 results
NCSBN counted 186,760 first-time, US-educated NCLEX-RN candidates in 2024 and 317,867 candidates in total. Every one who passed now renews a license on a schedule a state board sets, and her catalog stops the day they sit the exam

Cathy Parkes has done the thing this blog spends most of its time asking creators to do. She built the subscription. It is right there in her own storefront data. Flashables Essentials and Flashables Accelerate both return two recurring selling plans from the store's product endpoint, "Renews every 30 days" and "Renews every 12 months," each with a 20% price adjustment for choosing the recurring option. That is not a course sold twice. That is money that arrives whether or not she films anything this month. So this is not another post about a creator who never priced a product. It is about where the product stops.

What Does Cathy Parkes Actually Sell?

Study material for nursing school. On September 15, 2026 the Level Up RN catalog returned 63 products across 70 priced variants, from $5.00 to $549.95, at a median price of $49.95. Fifty of those 63 are flashcard decks, flashcard bundles, or review card games. The two largest items are The Ultimate Nursing School Survival Kit at $299.95 and The Comprehensive Nursing Collection at $549.95. The subject list reads like a nursing program's course catalog because that is exactly what it is: Fundamentals, Pharmacology, Med-Surg, Peds, Maternity, Psych, Lab Values, EKG, Health Assessment, Nutrition, Dosage Calculation. There is a study planner, a tip-of-the-day calendar, sticker packs, and an activity pack sold to nursing educators.

Look at that box and then look at the two screens above it. The decks are the business she is known for. The screens are Flashables, the digital version, the part that renews. She built the physical product, then built the recurring one on top of it, which is a sequence almost nobody in this corpus has completed. The catalog has one boundary, and it is a date on a calendar. Everything in it points at the ATI, the HESI, and the NCLEX. Her customer studies hard for two or three years, sits one exam, passes, and leaves.

She Already Built the Subscription. It Has an Expiry Date Built Into the Customer.

A subscription business has two halves: a price that repeats and a reason to stay. Level Up RN has a very good version of the first half and a structural problem with the second. NCSBN's own 2024 NCLEX examination statistics put 186,760 first-time, US-educated candidates in front of the NCLEX-RN that year, and 170,256 of them passed, a 91.2% rate. Across all candidate types, 317,867 people tested.

That is a genuinely enormous annual intake, and it is also the shape of the problem. It is an intake, not a population. Every year Level Up RN acquires a cohort, serves it for roughly two to three years, and hands it back. The churn is not a retention failure. It is written into the product definition.

Why Does Her App Have 26 Ratings?

Because it was built as a viewer for courses that live on the web, and it ships under somebody else's developer account. The Level Up RN app is free, holds 26 US ratings at a 2.7 average, and lists Chief Digital Advisors LLC as its developer with the copyright line reading Level Up RN. Its own description calls it "the official Level Up RN courses app," built so you can "switch between desktop and mobile without losing your course progress." The App Store Information panel on that listing shows Seller, Size, Category, Compatibility, Languages, Age Rating and Copyright. There is no In-App Purchases row. The subscription she built does not run through the phone at all. Meanwhile, here is the shelf her students are actually standing in front of.

App	Publisher	US ratings
NCLEX RN Mastery Exam	Higher Learning Technologies	31,101
Archer Review NCLEX	Archer Review	22,489
Picmonic Nursing School Study	Picmonic	21,178
Bootcamp.com	Bootcamp Prep LLC	17,067
Saunders Comp Review NCLEX RN	Skyscape Medpresso Inc	12,490
NCLEX PN Mastery Prep	Higher Learning Technologies	10,746
Level Up RN	Chief Digital Advisors LLC	26

Every one of those is free to download. Not one of them belongs to a nurse with 842,000 subscribers. This blog has now found the same structure in 3D printing, where the top app is published by the company selling the printer, and in barbecue, where the probe manufacturer holds 141,153 ratings to the pitmaster's 2,065. Nursing is the version where the creator got closest and still ended up off the shelf.

Who Sets the Renewal Date?

A state board of nursing does, and it keeps setting it for the rest of the customer's career. California requires 30 contact hours of continuing education every two years. Florida requires 24 hours per biennium. Texas requires 20 contact hours of continuing nursing education every two years or an approved national certification. New York renews registration every three years with NYSED-approved infection control coursework every four.

State	Renewal cycle	Continuing education required
California	Every 2 years	30 contact hours
Florida	Every 2 years	24 hours, including named mandatory topics
Texas	Every 2 years	20 contact hours, or an approved national certification
New York	Every 3 years	Infection control coursework every 4 years

Read that table as a creator rather than as a nurse. Somebody else already built the deadline. Somebody else enforces it, audits it, and attaches a licence to it. The customer does not need to be persuaded that the date matters, and the creator does not have to invent a streak, a challenge, or a habit loop to make the product recur. This is the axis. Not how often the audience does the thing, and not whose calendar funds it, but whether a third party with legal authority writes a renewal date onto your customer and keeps rewriting it.

The renewal date already exists. The product should too.

BUILT BY FOUNDRY builds the subscription product your audience already needs, prices it with you, and runs it forever. $0 upfront, revenue share, roughly three weeks to the App Store.

See What We’d Build You →

The Credential Test

Here is the one-line version you can run against your own audience in a minute. Does your audience hold a credential that somebody else forces them to renew on a schedule? It passes for nurses, pharmacists, paramedics, CPAs, real estate agents, insurance brokers, electricians, commercial pilots, dive instructors, teachers and personal trainers. It fails cleanly for gardeners, home bakers, and hobby photographers, which is what makes it a test rather than a slogan. Those audiences need a different frame, like the session test we ran on barbecue or the four-field check on whether your store can charge anybody twice. When it passes, three things are already true before you write a line of code. The deadline exists. The customer is legally required to meet it. And the record of having met it has to be kept somewhere, which is the most boring and most durable software job there is.

If You Teach a Licensed Profession

If you are a creator whose audience carries a licence, you are not in the education business. You are in the compliance business and you have been giving it away. Look at what Cathy Parkes has that a test-prep company does not. She has 116 million views of a nurse explaining nursing to nurses. She has 842,000 people who trust her more than they trust a question bank. She has a catalog those people already paid $49.95 a time for. What she does not have is a reason for a working med-surg nurse in year seven to open anything with her name on it, and a working nurse in year seven has thirty contact hours due, a licence number, an employer, and a renewal date in eighteen months. The product that serves that person is not a course. It is a place that knows which hours they have banked, which ones the board will accept, when the deadline lands, and where the certificate went. It is open for forty years instead of three, and it never once needs to persuade anyone to log in. She would not be starting from nothing, either. She has the subject taxonomy, the video library, the instructional voice, and a working recurring rail. The gap is the surface, and the surface is the phone. The Proko catalog showed the same asymmetry in art instruction: the tools that touched daily practice were the ones nobody had priced. Built by Foundry builds that product, prices it with the creator, ships it in roughly three weeks, and runs it forever afterwards so the creator never becomes a software company by accident. $0 upfront, revenue share, and the creator owns the business. That is the whole model. Cathy Parkes spent nine years teaching nurses how to pass one exam. There are 170,256 people a year on the other side of it, and every one of them has a renewal date.

See What We’d Build You →

All figures verified September 15, 2026 against the Level Up RN YouTube channel, the leveluprn.com product endpoint, the US App Store listing and search results, the NCSBN 2024 NCLEX examination statistics, and the four state boards of nursing linked above. Current-state claims require revalidation before later use.

Cathy Parkes Has 842K Subscribers and 63 Products for 1 Exam. Her App Has 26 Ratings

Get Creator Revenue Insights

What Does Cathy Parkes Actually Sell?

She Already Built the Subscription. It Has an Expiry Date Built Into the Customer.

Why Does Her App Have 26 Ratings?

Who Sets the Renewal Date?

The Credential Test

If You Teach a Licensed Profession

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