Is Anki Free? Yes, Except on iPhone - 39 Prices Checked

Short answer, and it is the whole answer: Anki is free on Windows, macOS, Linux, Android and in a web browser. There is exactly one paid piece of the whole system, AnkiMobile, the official iPhone and iPad app, and it is a one-time purchase of $24.99 in the United States (checked 2026-09-08). No subscription. No in-app purchases. Apple's own listing data for the app confirms it: hasInAppPurchases is false.

That much you can read on a dozen pages. Here is what none of them tell you.

The $24.99 figure that every article quotes is the fifth-cheapest price in the world. We read AnkiMobile's price out of 39 App Store storefronts on 2026-09-08, and 33 of them charge more than the American price. If you are in Germany, France, Spain, Italy, the Netherlands, Ireland, Austria or Belgium, you pay EUR 29,99, which was $34.86 on the day we checked. That is 39 percent more than the number you will find on every other page about this.

What Anki Costs on Each Platform

The reason for the split is not a secret. AnkiMobile's purchases pay for the desktop app, the Android app and the sync service that everyone else uses for nothing. Anki's own site puts it plainly: "AnkiMobile is the official iOS app and all purchases help fund Anki's development."

What is odd is that the official site never prints the price. Neither does Wikipedia, which says only "(paid)". The two most authoritative pages on this subject, both of which rank on the first page for this question, do not contain a number.

The Price Is Not $24.99 Where Most People Live

We asked Apple's store for AnkiMobile's price in every storefront we could reach, all on 2026-09-08, and converted each to US dollars at that day's rates.

AnkiMobile price in every App Store storefront we could read on 2026-09-08, converted to US dollars at that day rates. The US $24.99 is the fifth-cheapest price in the world; the median is $30.20 and the eurozone pays $34.86. Prices read from Apple App Store listing for AnkiMobile Flashcards (app id 373493387) in each storefront on 2026-09-08, converted at open.er-api.com USD rates stamped 2026-09-08 00:02 UTC. Chart by Mindomax.

Indonesia is the cheapest at IDR 399,000, about $22.60. Colombia is the dearest at COP 119,900, about $38.28. That is a 1.69x spread for the same app. The median of all 39 is $30.20, which is 21 percent above the figure that circulates. Every figure in this section was checked 2026-09-08.

Two cases are worth calling out because they trip people up:

The United Kingdom pays GBP 24.99 (checked 2026-09-08). Same digits as the American price, so it looks identical, and it is really $33.83, about 35 percent more. This is the exact complaint behind the Anki forum thread titled "Why $33 for UK users and free to Android Users", which has 11,806 views and is still open.

Turkiye pays TRY 1,299.99, which was $26.83 at the rates of 2026-09-08. A user posted on Anki's forum in November 2025 calling the same nominal price "$31". The price did not change. The lira did. That is why every price on this page carries the date we checked it, and why a price without a date stops being true quietly.

Switzerland is the pleasant outlier: CHF 20.00, about $24.71 (checked 2026-09-08), cheaper than the United States.

There Is No Trial, and There Are No Promo Codes

You cannot try AnkiMobile before buying it. There is no free tier, no time-limited demo, and no lite version. The word "trial" does not appear once in Anki's entire FAQ, which runs to about 19,000 words. On promo codes the FAQ is direct: "Sorry, I do not offer promo codes, as preparing them takes time away from development."

This matters more than it sounds. The Anki forum thread asking for a way to try the iPhone app first has been read 73,050 times. That is more than fourteen times the views of the price complaint Google currently ranks third for this question, and it exists because there is no answer.

If you buy it and regret it, the refund is Apple's decision, not Anki's. The FAQ again: "any refund requests need to be made to Apple directly. Please note that except when required by law, refunds are at Apple's discretion."

How to Use Anki on an iPhone Without Paying

There is a free route, and it comes recommended by the person who wrote the app. Anki's FAQ says: "If you don't use Anki enough to justify the price, then you're welcome to use AnkiWeb instead or look into cheaper alternatives."

Sign up for a free AnkiWeb account, sync your collection from the desktop app, then open ankiweb.net in Safari or Chrome on your phone and review there. It costs nothing, forever.

Be honest with yourself about what you give up. The browser reviewer needs a connection, so there is no studying on the underground or on a plane. If offline review is the reason you want a phone app at all, read our roundup of the best offline flashcard apps instead, because the free route will not solve it. You also lose review reminders, and typing answers in a mobile browser is worse than typing them in a native app.

For a lot of students that trade is fine. For a medical student doing 300 cards a day on a commute, it is not, and $24.99 once starts to look cheap.

What Anki Never Charges For

The $24.99 buys one client. It is not the price of Anki. Everything below is free on every platform, with no tier and no upsell:

Unlimited cards and unlimited decks. No cap is documented anywhere.

Sync across every device you own, through AnkiWeb.

The whole library of community shared decks, and the add-on ecosystem.

FSRS, the modern scheduling algorithm, built in since version 23.10 and supported by Anki desktop, AnkiMobile and AnkiWeb, with AnkiDroid supporting it from 2.17. Competing apps charge subscriptions for a scheduler like this. If you want to know what it actually changes, we compared FSRS against the older SM-2 algorithm in detail.

Automatic backups, thirty of them by default.

One catch is worth knowing, and Anki states it in its own manual rather than hiding it: "If you haven't accessed your account or synced in the last 6 months, the data on your account might get deleted." Only the copy on AnkiWeb's servers goes. Whatever is on your laptop or phone stays. But if you take a semester off and only ever had it in the cloud, it is gone, and Anki says it cannot get it back.

Three Apps With Anki in the Name, and Two of Them Are Not Anki

This is where people searching "is Anki free" lose money, and it is the part no other price article covers.

Two well-known apps used the Anki name for years without being connected to Anki. Both have now dropped it, and if you learned their names before 2026 you will not find them under those names any more.

AnkiApp is now AlgoApp. On 2026-09-08, ankiapp.com redirects to algoapp.ai. Its App Store bundle identifier is still com.ankiapp.client, and one of its in-app purchases is still literally called "AnkiApp Unlimited".

Anki Pro is now Noji. On the same day, ankipro.net redirects to noji.io with the query string ?from=ankipro attached, and its App Store in-app purchase list still contains tiers named "AnkiPro Premium 1 Month" and "AnkiPro Premium Annual".

Neither is affiliated with Anki. Neither is free.

Put the numbers on a timeline and the ranking inverts.

Twelve months in, the two apps that look free have charged $5.00 more than the one people call expensive. By year five it is $149.95 against $24.99. Anki on desktop, Android and the web is $0 and is not on this chart at all. US App Store prices and published in-app purchase tiers, all read 2026-09-08: AnkiMobile $24.99 one-time with no in-app purchases; AlgoApp Unlimited 1-Year $29.99; Noji Premium Plan $29.99 after a 3-day free trial. Arithmetic on those prices, not a forecast. Chart by Mindomax.

Twelve months in, the app that looks free has charged $29.99 and the app people call expensive has charged $24.99. Five years in it is $149.95 against $24.99. AlgoApp's lifetime tier, at $149.99, is six times AnkiMobile's one-time price. All four prices checked 2026-09-08.

None of this means the look-alikes are bad apps. AlgoApp holds 4.67 stars from 19,985 ratings and Noji 4.57 from 13,837, both better scores than AnkiMobile's 4.04 from 2,325. It means only that "free" on their store listing is a download price, not a usage price. We have full head-to-heads for both: Anki vs AnkiApp and Anki Pro vs Anki.

The Subscription That Is Not Anki's

If you have seen people talk about an "Anki subscription", they almost certainly mean AnkiHub, a separate service that syncs curated medical decks into Anki. It is not made by Anki and paying it is not paying for Anki. On 2026-09-08 its plans were $0, $6 a month, $10 a month, and $450 for a lifetime licence. Anki itself still costs what the table at the top says.

Two Things Worth Knowing Before You Pay

AnkiMobile has not been updated in a year. Version 25.09 shipped on 2025-09-08, exactly 365 days before we checked. Of the eight apps the App Store returns for the search "anki", it is the only paid one, it has the lowest rating of the eight at 4.04, and it is the only one that had not been updated within the previous twelve days.

The official explanation of the price is from 2013. Anki's FAQ page defending the cost, which ranks on the first page for these searches, still reads "At the time of writing (2013-10-04), SuperMemo's computer+iPhone version will set you back $60, and MentalCase's combo will cost you $29.95". It has not been revised in nearly thirteen years.

Neither of these makes AnkiMobile a bad purchase. A one-time $24.99 for software you may use daily for a decade is a good deal by any measure, and a stable app that does not need patching every fortnight is not obviously a fault. But you should know both before you decide, and nobody else will tell you.

So Should You Pay?

If you study mainly on a laptop or on Android, no. You will never pay Anki anything, and you should stop reading here.

If you study on an iPhone, you have three honest options and only one of them costs money.

Start with the free official route: AnkiWeb in your phone's browser. It is free forever, it syncs with your desktop collection, and Anki's own developer points people to it. Its limits are real but they are known: no offline review, no reminders.

Second, if you want a native free app and are not attached to Anki's file format, there are good ones, and our list of the best free flashcard apps covers the field. Ours is one of them. Mindomax is free on the Free Forever tier, and its Premium tier is listed at $0 free until 2028 (checked 2026-09-08 on our pricing page). The honest limitation, and it is two limitations: the free tier gives you one box rather than unlimited boxes, and "free until 2028" is a promise with an expiry date on it, so you are trusting that whatever it costs afterwards will still suit you. Anki's $24.99 has no expiry date, which is a real advantage and worth saying out loud on our own site. If you want the feature-by-feature version rather than our word for it, we wrote Mindomax vs Anki.

Third, buy AnkiMobile. Check your own App Store first, because the number on this page is almost certainly not the number you will be charged. If you are already deep into Anki decks, add-ons and shared collections, $24.99 once (checked 2026-09-08) is the cheapest serious flashcard purchase in this article, and it stays $24.99 in year five while the subscriptions keep going.

Whichever you pick, check the price yourself on the day you buy, in your own store. That is the only lesson on this page that will still be true in a year. If you want the same treatment applied to the other big name in flashcards, we did it for Quizlet Plus, and if you would like to try the free option we build while you decide, Mindomax takes about a minute to start.