What Pimsleur costs, including the year-2 price

I've never used Pimsleur. Everything below comes from Pimsleur's own pages, read on 21 September 2026, and from Apple's App Store listing. Where I calculated something, I show the division.

Here's the answer. Pimsleur's All Access annual plan bills $131.96 today and $164.95 on the same date next year.

Both figures sit in the page data of Pimsleur's own product pages. The keys are allAccessAnnuallyPricesWithPromotion and allAccessAnnuallyPrices.

So two years of Pimsleur is $296.91, and the number on the checkout screen is 44% of that.

Year 1 costs $131.96, and every year after costs $164.95

Every other price page I found prices the first charge. One is a 2025 guide whose own heading asks what Pimsleur costs "in 2023." It lists $164.95 a year and never says the first year is cheaper.

Read it and you budget too high. Read the others and you budget too low.

Both errors come from the same habit: pricing a subscription once. A subscription is a schedule of charges.

All Access annual, what you are actually charged

Today $131.96 After a 7-day free trial. Pimsleur's promotional annual price.

Month 13 $164.95 The standing renewal price, $32.99 higher.

Two years $296.91 $131.96 plus $164.95, which is $12.37 a month averaged.

A caveat I want to be honest about. Pimsleur runs promotions more or less constantly. (The Pashto page carried a red "Save BIG on All Access Annual" banner with a countdown while I was reading it.)

So $131.96 is a promotional price that happened to be live on 21 September 2026, with no guarantee it stays. The $164.95 is the standing rate, and it's the one to plan around.

For $1 more a month, you get every language

Pimsleur sells three subscription shapes. The price changes a little depending on whether you buy on the web or inside the iPhone app.

• All Access, every language. $20.95 a month on Pimsleur's site, $20.99 through Apple. Annual $164.95 standing, $131.96 promotional.
• Premium, one language. $19.95 a month on the web, $19.99 through Apple. Annual $149.95.
• Audio-Only, one language. $14.95 a month, listed as the plain "Monthly Subscription" in Pimsleur's own plan data.

The web and store prices are 4 cents apart. That gap comes from Apple's price-point grid (the fixed price steps Apple lets apps charge), so Pimsleur didn't pick it. Anyone telling you the App Store marks Pimsleur up is wrong by 4 cents a month.

The decision inside that list is easy, so I'll make it out loud. All Access costs $1 a month more than Premium and covers all 51 languages instead of one.

Premium only makes sense if you're certain you'll never open a second language. At a dollar a month, that certainty isn't worth insisting on.

Two more things, both from Pimsleur's FAQ. A subscription can be shared with "up to three family members." That puts All Access annual at $41.24 a head across four people.

And the trial is 7 days. Pimsleur's terms say in capitals that you must cancel before it ends to avoid the charge.

You can also buy a single-language course outright. Pimsleur's per-language lifetime pages, read the same day, list $575 for a full 5-level course such as Spanish, French or Russian, $150 for a single level and $249.95 for a two-level bundle. My Pimsleur review works out when buying one beats subscribing.

The all-languages lifetime plan I couldn't pin down to one figure, so I'm not printing one.

The head-to-head pages use these same prices, read the same day: Duolingo vs Pimsleur, Pimsleur vs Babbel and Rosetta Stone vs Pimsleur.

An hour of Pimsleur costs $2.20, if you finish the course

Now the division none of the price pages I checked do. It's the one that decides the purchase.

Pimsleur publishes the shape of its courses. Each conversational lesson is "approximately 30 minutes long." A course level is 30 lessons. And on access: "For most popular languages, there are 150 lessons."

150 lessons at half an hour is 75 hours of core audio. Against $164.95, that's $2.20 an hour. Against the first-year $131.96, it's $1.76.

That's cheap. It's cheap enough to make Pimsleur's own marketing look modest: its blog claims roughly $1.50 an hour against $50 for a private tutor. My figure from the published lesson count lands close to that.

But $2.20 an hour is the price if you finish 150 lessons. Do a lesson a day and that's five months without a gap.

Stop at the end of week two, where a lot of daily-audio habits die, and you've done 14 lessons. That's seven hours. The same $131.96 is now $18.85 an hour, and you've paid roughly a private tutor's rate for recorded audio.

I have no data on where Pimsleur buyers actually stop, and I won't invent a completion rate. The honest version: the per-hour price depends on your own persistence, and the sticker price tells you nothing about it.

So budget by asking how many lessons you'll really finish. Then divide.

One outside anchor for scale, because "75 hours" sounds like a lot until you price the job. The Foreign Service Institute (FSI) is the US State Department's language school. It puts Category I languages at "24-30 weeks (552-690 class hours)" to reach an ILR 3 in speaking and listening, a professional working level. Category I includes Spanish, French, Italian and Portuguese.

FSI has moved those numbers, and most sites still quote the retired figures.

Against 552 hours, a complete Pimsleur course covers about 14% of the classroom time for one language. It's a first chunk of a long job, priced accordingly.

Subscriptions get no refund, so watch the renewal date

How you cancel depends on where you bought. This is the part that generates the angry reviews.

Buy through the iPhone app and your billing relationship is with Apple. Pimsleur's terms say it plainly: to cancel a subscription bought through a third party, you "follow the cancellation instructions and adhere to the deadlines set out by the applicable distributor."

Cancelling on pimsleur.com doesn't stop an Apple charge, and Pimsleur can't refund one.

Buy on the web and you cancel by logging in to store.pimsleur.com. Do it no later than 11:59pm Eastern on the last day of the billing period.

On refunds, read the two policies as separate things, because the comparison pages blur them. The 30-day money-back guarantee covers purchased digital products, meaning courses you buy outright.

On subscriptions, Pimsleur's FAQ is flat: "We are unable to provide a refund of subscription charges" and "Refunds will not be issued for any part of an unused term."

So the renewal is the moment that matters, and there's no safety net behind it. Put a calendar reminder 2 days before the anniversary. That reminder is worth $164.95.

One more line to know before you start a trial: cancel during the trial and "you will lose access immediately upon cancellation." You don't get to ride out the remaining days.

Who should skip Pimsleur, and who should buy it

Pimsleur is audio, spoken aloud, drilled at expanding intervals. That design decides who it suits.

Skip it if you need the writing system. A course delivered through your ears doesn't teach you to read Cyrillic or Japanese script. Reading lessons are a side dish there, and the audio is the meal.

Skip it if your problem is that nobody corrects you. Pimsleur can't hear you. It prompts, you answer into the air, and a recording plays whether you were right or not.

If you can already produce sentences and need someone to tell you which ones are wrong, an hour with a tutor beats a month of audio. And the money goes further than you'd think.

Skip it if you're past the first thousand words. The course teaches "between 300 and 500 new vocabulary items" per 30-lesson level, chosen for you. An intermediate learner pays for a lot of material they already own.

Buy it if you have commute time or chore time that's empty now, and you want speaking to feel less frightening before you sit in front of a human. That's a real thing to buy, and $2.20 an hour is a fair price for it.

What Pimsleur won't do is hold on to the words after the lesson ends. Inside the course, its own method uses graduated interval recall: it asks for a word again at growing gaps. That's genuine spaced repetition ancestry, and it predates every app on this subject.

But it only spaces the words Pimsleur chose. Anything your tutor says, or you read, or you hear on the street stays your problem.

That gap is what I built. Verbamor is an iOS app that turns words from your own lessons into fill-in-the-blank cards with spoken audio and a generated image. FSRS schedules the cards. (FSRS is an open-source algorithm that predicts when you're about to forget each card.) It covers five languages: Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese and Russian.

It costs $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.

Beyond a starter deck of about 650 common words, it teaches you nothing new; it holds what you already met. And there's no free tier, which is a real reason to skip it.

If you're choosing between Pimsleur and a card app, buy Pimsleur. They do different jobs, and the one that gets you talking in the car is the better first purchase. Come back to cards when you have a tutor saying things worth keeping.

If you'll write those words in a notebook and test yourself properly, that beats every app here, mine included. Anki is free on desktop and Android and runs a serious scheduler.

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