How tiers work on ThaiDai

There are three tiers on ThaiDai: free, pro (monthly or annual), and lifetime. The differences are simpler than most apps make them out to be — and one common confusion is worth clearing up before you decide which is right for you.

Pro is access, not mastery. Upgrading unlocks all 1,191 entries and removes the daily card cap, but it does not auto-mark words as "learned". You still build your knowledge through the practice deck, the same as a free user would. The deck is your spaced-repetition queue across the words you have access to. Whether you got there by paying or by climbing the free ramp, the next 10 minutes you spend on the deck does the actual work.

What free gets you

• 20 starter words the day you sign up — pronouns, hello/thanks/sorry, the most-used verbs
• +20 words per completed lesson for the first three lessons (60 more)
• +20 words for hitting a 7-day practice streak (the daily-practice habit is the thing that actually moves the needle, so we reward it)
• 20 cards/day cap in the practice deck — enough for a real session, not enough to grind
• Every audio clip for the words you've unlocked, native-Thai-voice quality
• The full /resources library — every guide, free, no sign-up

That's a clear path to 100 words. The first 100 words cover roughly half of everyday conversation — get-by Thai, slowly.

What pro adds

• All 1,191 entries — every word and phrase in the curated frequency-tier vocabulary, available immediately
• No daily cap — unlimited cards in the practice deck
• Audio for every entry — every word and phrase gets the same native-Thai-voice rendering
• Multi-voice support when it ships (currently a single voice, with PR 15 in the roadmap for a male voice option)

Three pricing options:

• Monthly — $14.99/mo. Cancel any time. Works if you're trying it out for a month or two.
• Annual — $99/yr (effectively $8.25/mo). The best deal if you're committing to a year — and learning Thai really is a year-plus thing.
• Lifetime — $199 once. The right call if you'd rather make one decision and never see a billing email again. Lifetime means lifetime of the product; if we shut down, that's the end.

What pro doesn't do

It doesn't auto-learn the words for you. It doesn't grade you faster. It doesn't unlock a hidden tutor. The product is the same loop — listen, repeat, rate the card, come back tomorrow — for everyone.

If you want a guarantee of fluency, ThaiDai isn't that product, and neither is any other app. The guarantee comes from showing up to the deck for 10 minutes a day for six months. We make that 10 minutes as good as we can, but the 10 minutes are yours.

How long does this actually take?

If you do 10 new cards a day plus reviews — about 10 minutes — the rough timeline:

• Day 30: ~100 words known. The end of the free ramp; basic phrases land in conversations.
• Day 100: ~500 words. You start hearing patterns rather than individual sounds.
• Day 365: ~3,000 words. You're at the fluency line where most learners feel like they "know" Thai.

We have a longer write-up on how many Thai words you actually need if the number game is your thing. The short version: 1,000 covers 80% of casual conversation, 3,000 covers 92%. After that, every word is more specialised and gives you less marginal coverage.

FAQ

Can I downgrade from pro? Yes. Cancellation stops auto-renewal; your access continues until the end of the current period. After that you're back on free, with everything you've learned still in your account.

Lifetime — what does that actually mean? Lifetime of the product. We've committed to running ThaiDai for as long as it has paying users; if it ever shuts down, lifetime ends with it. We have no plans to shut down.

Refunds? 30-day no-questions-asked refund on any plan. After 30 days, refunds are at our discretion — usually fine if the reason is reasonable.

Why not free forever? The native-trained Thai voice we ship is generated by a third-party TTS service that charges us per audio render. The free tier covers ~100 words of cached audio per user; everything beyond that scales with us. Pro covers the cost of running the service plus a margin so we can keep adding content (3,000-word target by year-end). It's an honest exchange.

What if I just want the audio for a few specific words? That's exactly what free is for. We're not trying to nag you into upgrading if 100 words is what you need. The deck on free is fully functional inside its 20-card daily cap, and the audio is native-quality regardless of tier.

If you're starting from zero, the getting-started guide is the right next read. If you've used a Thai app before and want to know why this one's different, the Duolingo doesn't have Thai piece is more useful.