A Chinese app with no subscription

Wanyu is a Chinese-learning app with no subscription: free forever at its core, and a one-time €24.99 purchase unlocks everything else for life. No monthly fee, no ads, no accounts, no cloud — you pay once, or you pay nothing, and either way you’re never billed again.

Is there really no subscription?

Really. There’s no monthly or yearly fee, and no “pro” tier that renews on its own. Wanyu has a single, optional payment of €24.99, once. Everything you buy comes through that one button, and whatever gets added later — more vocabulary, more decks — lands behind the same payment, at no extra cost. There’s no card on file waiting for the 30th, either: the purchase goes through the store (App Store or Google Play), not through a server of ours.

What’s free, and what does the one-time purchase unlock?

Here’s the exact line, no fine print. The whole engine and most of the content are free forever; the one-time purchase opens the curated vocabulary for the higher levels.

The spaced-repetition engine (what is FSRS), the Reader, import and the library’s audio aren’t bait: they run in full in the free core. The one-time purchase is only for the curated HSK 3–6 vocabulary and the advanced band.

Can I try it before paying?

Yes. There’s a 7-day trial, free and with no card. You enter no payment method to try it, and if you don’t buy in the end, your progress isn’t wiped — what you studied stays. And even if you never pay, the free core — the engine, HSK 1–2, grammar and chengyu — is yours with no time limits and no usage caps.

The lines this model won’t cross

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

• The purchase covers ONE platform. With no accounts, the iOS purchase and the Android purchase don’t cross over: if you pay on iPhone, the payment doesn’t travel to Android on its own. What does travel is your data, via JSON export/import.
• 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. With Wanyu you pay once for tools and a library that stay yours, not for a drip of content.

So how does this hold up without a fee?

No mystery. Wanyu’s content is fixed and pre-generated — the audio, the glosses, the sentences — so there are no servers to keep running and no accounts to host. With no cloud to depend on, there’s no recurring per-user cost to justify a recurring fee. That’s why the model can be a one-time purchase: you pay for what’s there, not for the privilege of still being let in. 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’s core is free from the very first moment, and trying the rest asks for no card. 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.