Which is the cheapest AI language tutor chatbot app?
I checked the prices of the 6 most well-known or successful AI language tutor chatbots, in British Pounds and Mexican Pesos.
The prices are in the table below. Talkpal is the cheapest but please read my review of Talkpal — it’s definitely not the best.
I think Langua is the best. Langua is more expensive than others but the voices are more natural, the conversation content is more natural, it has a useful feature for saving vocabulary and it doesn’t use AI for things that AI often fails at (unlike Talkpal).
For a good but cheaper option, I recommend Univerbal.
Even cheaper options
Spoken: £4.99 or 120 MXN / month. Only available for English and Spanish. This app was developed by me and uses AI for assessing daily speaking tasks (it’s not a conversational chatbot).
ChatGPT in standard voice mode: Free. Read my article about the pros and cons of using ChatGPT for language practice.
These apps are cheaper in certain countries
The table below shows the prices in British Pounds and Mexican Pesos converted to British Pounds. You’ll see that people in Mexico pay about 30–50% less than people in the UK. This is very fair because Mexican salaries are at least 30–50% less than the UK.
Why have we made Spoken so much cheaper than other apps?
There are three main reasons.
1. Spoken is made by a team of just 2 of us. Me — a qualified language teacher and my co-founder — a very experienced mobile app developer. We don’t have a team of staff or rent an office, so our costs are low.
2. The app is still quite new (it launched in September 2024) so our focus right now is on getting lots of people using the app, rather than on how much money we can make. It’s possible we may raise the price a little in future but if you subscribe now, you’ll continue paying the current price.
3. Because the other apps contain conversational chatbots they need to use ChatGPT and voice generators much more heavily than we do, which also increases their costs. We focus on one speaking task per day where you speak for 1 minute and then try to improve it.
