Anki on iPhone costs $25. What that actually buys

Hello there! If you are looking at the App Store and wondering why a "free" app is asking for $24.99, you are not alone. Most students find Anki through a YouTube video or a Reddit thread that calls it the best free flashcard tool. Then they open their iPhone and hit a paywall.

I am Daniel. I am a third year engineering science student at the University of Toronto. I also work on Nebulearn. I have a clear conflict of interest here because I built a flashcard app, but I still use Anki for specific subjects. I believe in using the tool that actually fits your workflow.

The short answer is that AnkiMobile (the iOS version) is a one-time purchase of about $25. It is the only part of the official Anki ecosystem that costs money.

The logic behind the price tag

Anki is open source. The desktop version for Windows, Mac, and Linux is completely free. The Android version, AnkiDroid, is also free because it is maintained by a separate group of volunteers.

The lead developer of Anki uses the iOS app sales to fund the entire project. This includes the servers for AnkiWeb, which syncs your cards across devices for free. Without the $25 fee from iPhone users, the desktop and web versions would likely need a subscription model to stay alive.

It is a rare business model in an industry full of monthly bills. You pay once, and you own the app forever. There are no "Pro" features locked behind a second paywall and no ads.

Comparing the cost to other apps

When you see $25, it feels like a lot for a mobile app. But flashcard apps usually hide their true cost in subscriptions. If you look at the math over a four year degree, the "expensive" app often ends up being the cheapest option.

App	Upfront Cost	4-Year Cost (Estimated)	Scheduler Type
Anki (iOS)	~$25	$25	FSRS / SM-2
Anki (Android)	Free	$0	FSRS / SM-2
Quizlet Plus	$0	~$140+	Paid Spacing
Nebulearn	$0	$0 (Free Tier)	FSRS

Quizlet is a great example of the subscription trap. Their free version uses "Learn" mode, but that is session-scoped. It helps you master a set in one sitting, but it does not tell you when to review a card three weeks from now. To get their version of spaced repetition, you have to pay for Plus.

If you want to understand why that calendar view matters more than a single study session, you can read my guide on what is spaced repetition.

Who should pay the $25

I tell most people to start with Anki on a laptop first. It is free, and it is where you will do 90% of your card creation anyway. Typing out complex cards on a phone screen is a recipe for carpal tunnel.

You should buy the iOS app if:

1. You already have a massive deck (like AnKing for med school) that you need to review on the bus.
2. You want to support the development of an open source tool that has no investors.
3. You hate subscriptions and want to pay once and be done.

If you are a medical student, the $25 is almost mandatory. The pre-made decks for the USMLE are designed specifically for Anki. Trying to move those into a different app often breaks the formatting or the tags. You can read more about this in my breakdown of Nebulearn vs Anki.

Who should look for an alternative

The $25 fee is a bottleneck if you are a student on a tight budget who just needs to pass a midterm this Friday. If you do not have a massive library of existing cards, you might not need the heavy lifting that Anki provides.

You should probably skip the purchase if:

1. You only use flashcards for one specific exam and then never again.
2. You find the Anki interface too steep to learn.
3. You need to collaborate with a study group that does not use Anki.

There is also the "AnkiWeb" workaround. You can open Safari on your iPhone, go to the AnkiWeb site, and review your cards there for free. It is clunky, it does not work offline, and it lacks the gesture controls of the app, but it saves you $25.

How the bottleneck changes your workflow

The reason I built Nebulearn is that the "creation" step in Anki is slow. Even with the free desktop app, you are manually copy-pasting from PDFs or typing out definitions. For most students, the bottleneck isn't the $25 for the app; it's the 5 hours they spend making cards every Sunday.

If you are already halfway through a semester and you have 400 slides to turn into cards, starting from scratch in Anki is a massive project. You have to decide if you want to spend money to solve the "where do I study" problem or if you need a tool to solve the "how do I make these cards" problem.

I wrote more on that split in where Anki spends your time.