Four kinds of free
- Completely free. Everything’s free and it’s paid for some other way. There’s no subscription anywhere.
- A free plan. A limited version you can keep using for ever. Paying removes the limits, and you can finish something without paying.
- A free trial. Everything for 7 days, then nothing. It asks for your card when you sign up.
- Free to open. You hit a paywall within a couple of minutes, usually before you’ve learned anything.
The last kind is a waste of time, and it’s the one that turns up most in lists of free apps, because whoever wrote the list opened it, saw the home screen and moved on.
A two-minute test
Install it and try to finish one thing: a lesson, a chapter, whatever the app uses. If you finish and it asks whether you want to carry on, it’s a real free plan. If you get cut off halfway, it’s free to open. If it wants your card before you start, it’s a trial, whatever the listing says.
Why so many work like this
Every user costs an app money, whether the lessons are licensed or written by AI. Apps that give a decent amount away are choosing to take that cost. The better ones set a limit and tell you what it is. Others put the paywall right where you’ve started to get interested, because that’s when people are most likely to pay.
How Doomlearning does it
We have a free plan, not a trial. The first chapter of every course is free, quiz included. After that, free accounts get 5 new cards a day and can create up to 5 courses a day. You don’t need a card to start. Premium removes the daily limit and adds the Advanced level and longer courses. If you never pay, the app keeps working. Full details are on the pricing page.
Worth knowing
Apps that use AI to write their lessons, ours included, pay for every course they write, so their free limits are usually tighter than apps with ready-made content. That’s the trade-off for getting a course on exactly what you asked about.