Philosophy
No subscription. Ever.
Wordwren is free to download with a small banner ad. One cheap, one-time purchase removes ads and unlocks the full trainer, permanently. That's the entire pricing model — no tiers, no trial that quietly becomes a subscription, no price increase notice six months from now.
Why one-time
A vocabulary app is not a service you should have to keep paying for
Learning a word doesn't come with a recurring cost, so looking it up shouldn't either. A subscription only makes sense for something that keeps costing money to provide — new content every week, servers, live support. A dictionary and a flashcard trainer don't need any of that: the dictionaries ship with the app, the Leitner scheduling runs entirely on your device, and there's no account system to maintain on a server somewhere. Charging monthly for that would be charging for nothing.
Ads pay for continued development instead, and they're kept out of the way on purpose: they can appear while you're browsing the dictionary or your list, and never once you start a flashcard or spelling session. If you'd rather not see them at all, the one-time purchase removes them for good.
Ownership
Your words are yours
There's no account and no login — your dictionary lookups, saved words, and training history live on your device, not on a server tied to a login you have to keep paying to access. You can export your entire list to a plain JSON file at any time, straight from Settings, whether you're backing it up, moving to a new phone, or just want a copy you can read yourself. Nothing about Wordwren is designed to make your own data hard to leave with.
No pressure
No streak-guilt
Wordwren won't push you a notification about a broken streak, and there's no counter designed to make skipping a day feel like a loss. Spaced repetition already tells you exactly which words are due — that's enough signal on its own, without turning your vocabulary practice into a guilt mechanism engineered to keep an app's engagement numbers up.
The math
One purchase vs. a monthly bill
Illustrative numbers for a typical subscription-based learning app, compared with Wordwren's one-time purchase.
| Wordwren | Typical subscription apps | |
|---|---|---|
| Price model | One-time purchase | Monthly or annual subscription |
| Typical cost | A few dollars, once | $5–15 per month |
| Cost after 1 year | Same one-time price | $60–180 |
| Cost after 3 years | Same one-time price | $180–540 |
| Access if you stop paying | Full access, forever | Often locked or limited |
Subscription figures are illustrative of common language-learning app pricing, not a quote from any specific competitor.