A Chinese app with no subscription

Wanyu is a Chinese-learning app with no subscription: it’s completely free, with no in-app purchases. No monthly fee, no ads, no accounts, no cloud — you pay nothing, and there’s no card to enter to use the whole thing.

Is there really no subscription?

Really. There’s no monthly or yearly fee, no “pro” tier that renews on its own, and no payment button anywhere in the app. All the vocabulary, decks, grammar and everything else is yours from day one, with nothing to unlock. There’s no card on file waiting for the 30th, either: there’s nothing to bill.

What’s free?

Here’s the exact line, no fine print: everything. The whole engine and all the content are free forever.

The spaced-repetition engine (what is FSRS), the Reader, import and the library’s audio aren’t bait: they run in full, same as everything else. The curated HSK 3–6 vocabulary and the advanced band are free too, with nothing to pay afterwards.

Are there any in-app purchases?

No: it’s completely free, with no pro tier and no locked content. You enter no payment method because there’s nothing to buy. The core and everything else — engine, HSK 1–6, grammar and chengyu — is yours from the very first moment, with no time limits and no usage caps. Everything Wanyu has today is free and will stay free; if we ever add something paid, it will be new, optional and clearly priced.

The lines this model won’t cross

There’s no catch here, but there are honest limits worth knowing before you pay:

• No cloud means no automatic sync. Your words and decks live on the device. To move them to another phone, you export a JSON file and import it — by hand, by you, whenever you want. There’s no server doing it for you.
• Wanyu isn’t a subscription app with fresh content every week. If what you want is a catalogue of editorial graded readers that grows week by week, that’s a different product — the Wanyu vs Du Chinese comparison lays it out. Wanyu is a tool and a library that stay yours, not a drip of content.

So how does this hold up without charging anything?

No mystery. Wanyu’s content is fixed and made once — the glosses, the sentences, the Wanyu voice — so there are no accounts to host and no servers doing work for each user: the only thing downloaded from outside is the optional voice packs, static files that are cheap to host. With no cloud to depend on, there’s no recurring per-user cost to cover. That’s why the model can be free: the big cost is already paid before the app ships, and it doesn’t repeat for every person who uses it. Your data, on top of that, lives on your device and leaves with you as JSON whenever you want — and this site doesn’t track you either.

Try it yourself

Wanyu is free from the very first moment, all of it. Download it and get started.

More features: Chinese reader · spaced repetition (FSRS) · HSK library. The math against a subscription app, done: Wanyu vs Du Chinese.