Is Readlang free, and what are the real free alternatives?

Is Readlang free? Yes, with three limits

The free plan is a real plan, not a demo. You create an account, pick a language, and read: paste text, upload a DRM-free EPUB, open something from the shared library, or install the Web Reader extension and click words on any website. Every single-word translation is free, today and next year. There is no card to enter and nothing that switches off after a week.

Three counters separate it from Premium. Phrase translations, where you select several words and get the whole expression translated, are limited to ten a day and six words per phrase. AI explanations, the "why is this word here" answers, are also ten a day. And word highlighting stops after 200 words in total. Everything else in the pricing table, audio storage, Readlang voices, streak repairs, per-book flashcard practice, is an extra rather than a limit on reading. The Readlang pricing page has the full table.

Two searches deserve a direct answer. "Readlang premium free": there is no way to get Premium without paying; there is no trial code, no student route and no referral scheme on the site. Pages offering a "Readlang Premium APK" or a "mod" are not Readlang, which has no app of any kind, and should be left alone. "Is Readlang free" in any other language, es gratis, é gratuito, ücretsiz mi: the answer does not change by country. One free plan, the same limits, one subscription in US dollars that covers every language.

Who the free plan already covers

Before looking for an alternative, it is worth checking whether you are the reader the free plan was designed for, because many people are.

• You click single words. News, blog posts, subtitles, product pages: most unknowns in non-fiction are single nouns and verbs, and those are unlimited.
• You read a little, often. Ten phrases a day is one or two per page of a short article. If your sessions are fifteen minutes, the counter rarely runs out.
• You bring your own material. Uploading texts and EPUBs is free, and so is the shared library. The free plan does not restrict what you read, only how many phrases you look up.
• You want the extension. The Web Reader extension for Chrome, Edge and Firefox is the reason many people choose Readlang over anything else, and the pricing page does not tie it to a paid plan.
• You learn a language outside the mainstream twenty. With more than a hundred languages, Readlang is often the only reader that has yours at all, free or paid.

If that is you, the free alternative to Readlang is Readlang. Use it for a month and see whether a counter ever stops you.

When the free plan is not enough

The complaints that push people to search for something else fall into two groups, and only one of them is about money.

The first group is the counters. A fiction reader who selects idioms and multi-word verbs will hit ten phrases before the chapter ends, most days. A learner using AI explanations as a grammar tutor will hit ten by lunchtime. These are the cases where Readlang would say, reasonably, that $4 a month on the yearly plan is the fix. If you would rather not pay, the alternatives below are for you, and each one costs something other than money.

The second group has nothing to do with the plan. There is no offline mode on any tier; every translation is a request to the server. And there is no native phone app: on an iPhone or an Android phone Readlang is the website added to the home screen, and on the forum people have been asking for an app and for offline reading for years. No upgrade fixes either. If these are your reasons, you are looking for a different kind of tool rather than a cheaper one, and the Readlang alternatives page covers the paid options as well.

Free alternatives, by what you actually need

Free never means without cost. Each option below costs time, features or reach, and the honest comparison says which.

You want open source and your own server: LUTE

LUTE is open-source software in the "learning with texts" tradition, and you host it yourself. That means no plan, no counter and no company that can change the price; it also means the setup and upkeep are yours, on your own computer or server. It suits people comfortable with that, and it is the right answer to the search "readlang open source alternative", which has very few other answers. We have not reviewed LUTE feature by feature here, because we would be describing someone else's software from the outside; install it and judge it on your own texts.

You want zero setup: the Readlang free plan

Covered above, listed here for completeness because it is the free alternative most people skip past. Cost: ten phrases a day, ten explanations a day, no audio, no offline, no app. Value: more than a hundred languages, the extension, the video player with transcripts, flashcards with frequency-ranked spaced repetition, and a shared library. For a desktop reader who clicks single words, nothing free comes close.

You need one article understood: translation built into Safari or Chrome

Both browsers translate a whole page in place, on a phone and on a desktop, at no cost. As a language-learning tool it is crude: it translates everything at once rather than the word you are stuck on, it saves nothing, and it builds no vocabulary. But if the question is "I need to get through this one article", it answers it, and it works on sites where nothing else does. Treat it as the fallback, not the method.

You read on an iPhone: the Readlang Mobile free plan

Readlang Mobile is our app, and it is independent of Readlang: a native iOS reader for iPhone and iPad, iOS 18 and later. Its free plan gives thirty translations a day, phrases up to six words, the whole graded library of public-domain books from A1 to C1, some with audiobooks that highlight the word being read, and any web article by pasting its link. No card, no trial period. By default, translation comes from Google Translate through the app's server; without a connection the app switches to Apple Translate, which translates on the device if the language pack for your pair is downloaded, and a book has to be opened online once. What it costs: the thirty-a-day cap counts every translation, words and phrases alike; your own EPUBs and vocabulary practice are on Premium; around twenty languages rather than a hundred; no Android, no extension, no video.

Readlang Free vs Readlang Mobile Free

The two free plans are built on different ideas, so a table is fairer than a verdict. Readlang Free removes the limit on what you read and counts phrases; Readlang Mobile Free counts every translation and gives away the library.

Readlang details from readlang.com, checked 14 September 2026. Readlang Mobile details are ours, as of the same date.

Read the table with your own habits in mind. A reader of fiction on a desktop who owns the EPUBs is better off on Readlang Free until the phrase counter bites, and then on Premium. A reader who wants to start from a graded book on a phone and does not own any EPUBs is better off on Readlang Mobile Free until the thirty-a-day counter bites, and then on its Premium at $8.99 a month or $59.99 a year, with the first year at $29.99 as of September 2026.

What "free" costs in each case

A short ledger, so nothing here reads as a free lunch.

• LUTE: your time to install and maintain it, and a machine to run it on. No limits after that.
• Readlang Free: ten phrases and ten explanations a day, no audio, no offline, no app. Everything else is open.
• Browser translation: no learning features at all. You understand the page and keep nothing.
• Readlang Mobile Free: thirty translations a day, about twenty languages, iPhone and iPad only, own EPUBs on Premium. The library is included, and so is Apple Translate, which works offline with a downloaded language pack.

And a word for the paid option, since this page would be dishonest without it. Readlang Premium at $48 a year is one of the cheapest paid readers there is; the Readlang vs LingQ page shows the gap against the best-known competitor. If the free options above each cost you something you are not willing to give, $4 a month is a fair trade, and our Readlang review says so.

How to choose in one minute

1. Read one chapter of what you actually want to read on the Readlang free plan. If no counter stops you, stop here.
2. If the phrase counter stopped you and you read at a desk, decide between Premium at $48 a year and LUTE on your own machine. Money or time.
3. If what stopped you was the phone, not the counter, install Readlang Mobile and read the same chapter from its library. Thirty translations a day is the test.
4. If you only ever needed one article, use the translation in your browser and move on.

Whichever way you go, the method is the same: read something slightly too hard and look up what stops you. The tool only decides how many lookups you get and where you get them. The Readlang guide has the rest of the map, including the paid alternatives and the phone question in detail.

Questions people ask