Memrise review: the price nobody agrees on

I haven't used Memrise. Everything below comes from Apple's own App Store listing, Memrise's homepage, and 217 articles in Memrise's own help centre, all read on 21 September 2026. Where I couldn't verify something, I say so rather than rounding it off.

That matters here more than on most reviews, because the money question has no settled answer. On the same day, the page ranking first for "memrise review" said lifetime access is $119.99. The third said "about $330." The second refused to name a figure at all, calling it "a few dollars to over a hundred dollars," in a review whose whole argument is that you shouldn't pay.

So the verdict first. Memrise is worth paying for if you want native-speaker video in a widely-taught language and you'll accept a review schedule you can't influence.

Use the free plan if you mainly want to sample a language. Skip it if you're past the beginner stage or learning something outside its main lineup.

The price depends on your country, so four pages give four answers

Memrise explains the disagreement itself. Its help centre says you can see "all the available subscriptions, prices and payment methods for your country" only "by tapping the Upgrade button on the Android or iOS app or by visiting memrise.com/premium while logged in."

A price behind a login and varying by country is a price no reviewer can quote flatly. Twelve currencies are listed on the web checkout, and the help centre adds that if yours is missing, "the price will appear in USD."

What is public is Apple's listing, which prints the US in-app purchases by name. On 21 September 2026 it showed ten of them:

Memrise in-app purchases, US App Store, 21 September 2026

Monthly $24.99 "Monthly Language Learning Plan"

3-month $24.99 "3-Month Language Learning Plan," the same figure as one month

Annual $61.99 "Annual Language Learning Plan"

Lifetime $329.99 "Lifetime Plan." A separate "Lifetime Plan Offer" sits at $131.99

Now the contradictions resolve. The "$330 lifetime" figure is close to Apple's standing $329.99, and the "$119.99" is in the neighbourhood of the discounted $131.99 offer. Both reviewers probably saw a real price; neither said which one, or when.

The three-month plan carrying the same $24.99 as the one-month plan is the detail I'd want before tapping anything.

Two things are flat-out confirmed, and both are unusually good terms. Memrise runs a 30-day money-back guarantee, with monthly plans narrowed to 14 days, and Apple purchases routed through Apple. And lifetime is "a one-off upfront payment without any renewals."

None of the three reviews above mentions the refund window, which is the most useful fact for someone hovering over a $329.99 button.

Every learner gets the same eight rungs

Memrise publishes its review schedule, which most apps don't, and it's the most important thing on this page after the money.

From the help centre, updated 17 September 2026: "When reviewing a word or sentence correctly, the item will be moved to a longer interval. The review schedule is as follows: 4 hours > 12 hours > 24 hours > 6 days > 12 days > 48 days > 96 days > 6 months." Get one wrong and "it will be moved back to the first interval."

Eight rungs, identical for every user and every word. The word you've fumbled nine times and the word you got instantly sit on the same ladder, and nothing you do moves a rung. Compare that to a scheduler that fits a memory model per card, where a word you keep missing comes back sooner because you keep missing it.

Walk the rungs and the cost shows up. Four correct answers put you at about day 8 (4 hours + 12 hours + 24 hours + 6 days). Miss once then and you're back to 4 hours, re-climbing the whole thing. Meanwhile a word you've never missed jumps from 12 days to 48.

Memrise does adapt in one place, and credit where it's due: how many times you're drilled before a word enters review. The default is 6, but items drop to 4 or 3 based on "the accuracy scores of everyone that learned the course before you." That's adaptation based on the crowd rather than on you, and it ends once the word reaches the ladder.

A fixed ladder is predictable and needs no setup, which is a real virtue if the thing stopping you is fiddling with settings. It's the trade every scheduler makes, and Memrise picked one end of it deliberately.

The free plan is a real sample, and the AI chat partners are paid

Memrise states the split in its own App Store copy, so this needs no inference. Pro opens up all vocab lessons and "all native speaker videos," gives "unlimited speaking practice" and removes ads. The free plan gets "limited vocab lessons," "limited videos and conversations," and ads.

In the app the boundary is visible: scenarios with stars are Pro, and on mobile "free scenarios have a blue outline whereas Pro scenarios have an orange outline and stars."

So the free tier is a genuine sample rather than a crippled shell, and it never expires. Word Information, the screen with translations and real-world clips, is free too: "You can currently access Word Information for free."

The AI chat partners are the clearest paid line. Grammar Buddy, Role Play Buddy, Conjugation Buddy and the rest: "you require a Pro subscription to access this feature."

One thing the free plan can't get back at any price. Community-made courses, the user-generated library that was Memrise's original draw, left the apps on 31 March 2024 and now live only at a separate site.

Memrise's reasoning is published and blunt: the courses "were of hugely varied quality," support "comes at a significant cost," and keeping them "hinders the development of the main Memrise experience." The community forum closed in December 2023.

If you're returning to Memrise after a few years because you remember a particular community deck, that's the sentence to read twice.

Your language probably isn't the one they demoed

Every Memrise review I read is really a review of one language. The top result is a Chinese school's page, and most of its criticism is about Chinese characters. Which is useless to you if you're learning Portuguese.

Memrise's own help centre is specific where the reviews are vague, so here's the per-language picture for the five languages I know best.

The "Learn, Immerse, Communicate" rebuild covers Spanish (both Spain and Mexico), French, Italian, Portuguese (both Portugal and Brazil) and Russian. All five are in. So far so even.

The AI Buddies are where it splits. For English speakers, Memrise lists them for Spanish, French, Italian and both Portuguese variants. Russian is not on that list. Neither is it on the second list covering other interface languages.

So a Russian learner paying the same subscription gets the vocabulary and the videos, and not the conversation practice that the homepage sells.

Memrise says a rollout is ongoing, so this may change. It hadn't on 21 September 2026, and no review I found mentions it.

There's a second Russian-shaped hole. Memrise's Romanisation toggle, which lets you learn a script language in Latin letters, is documented with Korean, Japanese and Arabic as the examples. Cyrillic is a small alphabet and most learners get through it in a week, so this matters less than it would for Japanese.

But a vocabulary app with a fixed ladder has no mechanism at all for Russian case endings, and six cases across three genders is where Russian learners actually stall. Drilling stol as a single item never teaches you stolom.

Portuguese learners get a genuinely good deal here, incidentally: Memrise splits European and Brazilian Portuguese as separate courses with separate video, which most apps don't bother to do.

Beginners in four languages should buy it, and most others shouldn't

The three reviews above this one each give a score that argues with their own prose. One scores it 8/10 and says "money is better spent elsewhere." One scores 7.4/10 and concludes "we do not believe Memrise is worth it."

One gives 2/5 with no rubric. A buyer can't act on any of that, so no score here, just who it fits.

Buy Pro if you're a beginner or early intermediate in Spanish, French, Italian or Portuguese. It fits if you want to hear real people rather than a synthetic voice, and a fixed schedule you never think about is the kind you'll actually stick to.

The 30-day guarantee makes this cheap to test properly.

Stay free if you're sampling a language or you mainly want the video clips. The free tier is real and permanent.

Skip it if you're past intermediate, if you're learning Russian and wanted the speaking practice, or if what you need is to hold on to words from somewhere else. Memrise teaches its own curriculum, and no plan lets you push your own vocabulary into it the way the old community courses did.

Where Memrise genuinely beats what I build: it's free to start, it covers far more languages, and the native-speaker video is the real thing rather than a marketing line. Verbamor has none of that.

What it can't do is the reason I built something. Memrise drills its words, in its order, on its ladder.

If you had a tutor session on Tuesday and a phrase came up that you keep fumbling, Memrise has no idea. And that's the vocabulary that goes missing by Friday.

Verbamor is an iOS app that records a lesson and turns what you said into fill-in-the-blank cards. FSRS schedules them (it's an open-source algorithm that predicts when you're about to forget each card).

It covers six languages, at $19.99 a month or $129.99 a year with a 7-day trial on the annual plan. Both are US prices, read off the app's own plan definitions on 21 September 2026. The App Store sets a different number in other countries. No free tier, which is a real reason to pick Memrise instead.

And the honest version: plenty of people need neither. If you'll write your lesson words in a notebook and actually test yourself cold, that beats both apps and costs nothing.

Anki is free on desktop and Android, runs a serious scheduler, and will take any card you can build. It's the better choice for anyone willing to make their own cards. Memrise exists for people who won't, and that's a large and reasonable group.

I'll re-check the prices in three months and date the change here.

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