The referee's card

What this site is

Streakbreak is a decision site for one narrow, expensive question: which brand-name language app deserves your subscription. We don't publish generic 'best apps' lists, method guides or study plans — other sites do that. We put two or three named apps in a ring, apply the same published 100-point card to each, and call the bout for a specific kind of learner.

The name is a small confession: the industry's favourite metric is the unbroken streak, and we think the more useful moment is the broken one — the week you lapse is when you find out whether an app was teaching you anything or just pinging you. We score for the learner who will sometimes miss a Tuesday.

Where the facts come from

Prices and plan terms are read from the vendors' own pages — their web checkouts, their published terms, their US App Store listings — and each figure on this site carries the date it was read and the storefront it came from. Where a vendor publishes no readable price (it happens more than you'd think), we say 'not published' rather than borrowing a number from a third-party roundup. We make no fluency claims and quote no outcome statistics, because the honest ones don't exist in public.

How the money works

Some outbound links are referral links: if you subscribe after clicking one, the vendor may pay us a fee. Two structural honesty checks keep that from steering verdicts. First, the weights are published before any bout is scored. Second, our most-recommended app for beginners — Duolingo's free tier — runs no affiliate program and pays us nothing, which would be a strange choice for a site optimising its commissions. The full list of who pays and who doesn't is on the disclosure page.

When we get something wrong

Prices in this category rot quickly; that's why everything is dated. If a checkout disagrees with a figure here, the checkout is right and we want to know — write to [email protected] and we'll re-read the source and correct the page. Corrections change the page's 'rechecked' date, so you can see what's been re-verified and when.

What we deliberately don't do

• No coupon or promo-code pages — stale codes waste your time and some void the vendor's own offers.
• No 'fluent in 90 days' framing, from vendors or from us.
• No pay-to-play: no app can buy a placement, a point or a kinder verdict.
• No fake testing theatre — where we haven't measured something, we assess the vendors' documented features and say so plainly.