Is Anki Free on iPhone? What AnkiMobile Actually Costs

Short answer: no. Anki is free on Windows, Mac, Linux, Android, and in your browser. The iPhone app is the one exception — AnkiMobile Flashcards costs $24.99 in the US App Store, as a one-time purchase with no subscription and no in-app purchases.

That mismatch is why so many people search this. You install Anki on your laptop, it's free and open source, you go to put it on your phone, and you hit a price tag. Nothing has gone wrong — iOS is genuinely the only platform Anki charges for.

Here's the full picture: what's free, what AnkiMobile costs in your country, why it costs anything, and the three legitimate ways to study Anki cards on an iPhone without paying.

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Where Anki is free

Four out of five platforms cost nothing. The desktop app is the most capable version of Anki that exists, and it's free. AnkiDroid is free because volunteers maintain it separately from the core project.

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What AnkiMobile actually costs

AnkiMobile is priced per App Store storefront, which is why you'll find $24.99, $29.99, and $34.99 all quoted online as "the" price. They're all correct — for different countries.

Here's what it costs in the storefronts most readers of this site buy from, checked on 30 August 2026:

A few things worth knowing about the purchase:

• It's one-time, not a subscription. You buy it once and it stays on your Apple ID, including future updates.
• There are no in-app purchases. Nothing is gated behind a second payment.
• It covers iPhone and iPad. One purchase, both devices.
• It's published by Anki Software, LLC — this is the official app, not a clone.

At $24.99 it's one of the more expensive apps in the App Store's Education category. It's also, by most measures, worth it if you're a heavy Anki user — you're buying a mature, actively maintained client for a system you already rely on.

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Why the iPhone app costs money

The official Anki site is direct about it: AnkiMobile is the official iOS app, and purchases help fund Anki's development.

That's the whole model. Anki has no ads, no subscription, no venture funding, and no data business. The paid iOS app is what pays for the free desktop app, the free AnkiWeb sync service, and continued development of the open-source project. When you buy AnkiMobile, you're not just buying an iOS client — you're funding the thing everyone else uses for free.

Whether that's a reason to pay or not is your call. But it's a considerably more honest arrangement than most study apps offer, and it's worth knowing before you write it off as a cash grab.

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Three legitimate ways to use Anki on iPhone for free

1. AnkiWeb in Safari

Sign up for a free account at ankiweb.net, sync your collection from desktop, then open the site in Safari on your phone and review there. No purchase, no app.

The catches are real, though: it needs a connection, so no studying on the subway; it's a web page rather than a native app, so it's slower and clunkier than either AnkiMobile or a normal iOS app; and card creation and editing are awkward on a phone screen. It also prunes inactive accounts — if you don't sync or sign in for six months, your data there may be deleted.

Good for occasional reviews. Not good as your daily driver.

2. Desktop-first, phone-rarely

If most of your studying happens at a desk anyway, use free Anki on your computer and don't study on your phone. Plenty of people do this. Anki desktop is more powerful than any mobile client, and you lose nothing except the ability to review in queues and waiting rooms.

3. Import your decks into a free iOS app

Anki's .apkg format is readable by other apps. If what you actually want is your existing decks on your phone, free, in a native app, you can move them.

This is the route most people searching "free Anki for iPhone" are really after, so it's worth being precise about the trade-off: you get a free native iOS app, but you leave the Anki ecosystem — no add-ons, no AnkiWeb sync back to desktop.

We compared the iOS apps that read .apkg in the best free Anki alternatives for iPhone.

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What is not a free route

Apps advertising themselves as "free Anki" on the App Store. Several third-party apps borrow the Anki name and visual identity without any affiliation to the project. Most are subscription-based behind a trial, and many can't import .apkg files at all — which defeats the point if you already have decks. We wrote a fuller breakdown of the best-known one in Is AnkiPro safe?.

"Cracked" or sideloaded AnkiMobile. Beyond the obvious problems, you'd be pirating from a small developer who funds a free open-source tool with that revenue. If you can't afford $24.99, use AnkiWeb — it's free and it's sanctioned.

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If you just want free spaced repetition on iPhone

If your goal is "study my cards on my phone with a good algorithm, without paying," rather than "run Anki specifically," MintDeck is built for exactly that case.

It imports Anki .apkg files — cards, media, cloze and image-occlusion types, tags, and your review schedule, so your due dates land where you left them rather than resetting. It runs FSRS, the same modern scheduling algorithm Anki itself now ships. The import takes about two minutes.

On price, so there's no asterisk: the study engine is free and unlimited — importing, manual card creation, FSRS review, audio study, image occlusion, and iCloud sync all cost nothing. The one paid part is cloud AI generation (turning a topic or a PDF into cards), which runs on credits — you get 10 free at signup, and more are a one-time purchase rather than a subscription. You never need to touch it to study your own decks. The full line-by-line breakdown is here.

The honest trade-off: MintDeck is iOS-only, and it's not Anki — no add-on ecosystem, no AnkiWeb sync. If you depend on either, buy AnkiMobile. It's the right tool and the money goes somewhere good.

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The bottom line

Anki is free everywhere except iPhone, where the official app costs $24.99 in the US and up to AU$39.99 depending on your storefront. There's no trial and no free tier, and that revenue funds the free versions everyone else uses.

If you're a committed Anki user, it's a fair one-time price for a tool you'll use daily for years. If you mainly want your decks on your phone with a modern algorithm and no upfront cost, importing them into a free app is the faster answer.

What you shouldn't do is pay a monthly subscription to a third-party app wearing Anki's name — that's the one option that costs more than AnkiMobile and delivers less.

Import your Anki decks free →