SaygoodComparisons › vs Memrise

Saygood vs Memrise

Memrise is the vocabulary app with thousands of clips of real people saying real things — and an AI chat feature bolted on top.

Prices verified 30 July 2026 · US iOS App Store
The short answer

Memrise's genuine advantage is its library of short video clips of native speakers talking normally, which is the best answer in this category to 'why does nobody sound like the app?' Its core loop is spaced repetition for vocabulary, and it has added an AI chat partner. It is a memory tool with a conversation feature; Saygood is a conversation with no memory tool. Memrise also offers a lifetime plan at $329.99, which changes the maths if you are in this for the long haul.

Side by side

Saygood vs Memrise — all pricing read from the US iOS App Store on 30 July 2026.
 SaygoodMemrise
Open-ended live voice conversationYes — the call is the whole productAI chat partner, turn-based
How the voice actually worksLive speech-to-speech, no transcribe-then-reply stepText-first chat with speech bolted on
Can you interrupt mid-sentence?Yes, either directionNo
Structured course / syllabusNo syllabus. You talk, then get a recapSpaced repetition over vocabulary, plus native-speaker clips
Languages20+20+
Real human partners or tutorsNo — every partner is AIRecorded native speakers in clips
Works offlineNoYes on paid tiers
PlatformsiPhone onlyiPhone, Android, web
Free tier10 minutes of calling, totalLimited
Monthly (iOS)$29.99$24.99
Annual (iOS)$199.99 (~$17/mo)$61.99 · Lifetime $329.99

Saygood is better here Memrise is better here About the same

Where Memrise beats us

Putting this second, before the part where we argue for ourselves, is deliberate. Every comparison page on the internet written by a company about its competitors is a page where that company wins every row, and you already know to discount those. So here is the honest list first.

The native-speaker clips are the best thing of their kind.

Thousands of short videos of ordinary people speaking at normal speed, in the accent they actually have. Nothing we do replaces that, and it directly addresses the gap between textbook audio and real life.

Spaced repetition beats hoping you remember.

Memrise will make sure a word comes back at the right time. We will mention it in a recap and then forget it.

$61.99 a year is under a third of our annual price.

And the $329.99 lifetime costs less than two years of Saygood.

What Saygood does that Memrise does not

One thing, really. When you speak to a Saygood partner, your voice goes to the model as voice and comes back as voice, live — there is no step in the middle where your sentence is turned into text, answered as text, and read back to you. That sounds like an implementation detail and it is the entire product, because it is what decides whether the pause after you stop talking feels like a person thinking or like a machine processing.

It is also the difference between a conversation you can interrupt and one you cannot. Real conversations are full of overlap — you start answering before the other person finishes, they cut in when they realise what you are asking, someone says wait, no, I meant halfway through your own sentence. Practising without any of that is practising a version of speaking that does not exist outside of apps. It is why people finish a course, land in the country, and find that the first real exchange goes nothing like the ones they rehearsed.

The rest of Saygood exists to keep you on the call: partners with a city, a job and opinions rather than a neutral tutor voice; dials for how much they correct you, how much slang they use and how long they wait before jumping in; a recap afterwards of the two or three things worth fixing. But the call is the product, and everything above is in service of you staying on it for ten minutes instead of two.

So which one should you actually buy?

Pick Memrise if

you are building vocabulary, you want spaced repetition done properly, or you want to hear how real people actually say things.

Pick Saygood if

your vocabulary is fine and your problem is production — getting the words out at speed, in an order, to a person who is waiting.

And if the honest answer is both — which it often is — the sequence that works is the boring one: learn the words somewhere with a syllabus, then come and try to use them somewhere that will not wait for you.

Questions people actually ask

Is Memrise's AI chat the same as Saygood?

No. Memrise's chat is text-first with speech added; the app's centre of gravity is vocabulary review. Saygood has no vocabulary system at all and exists to run a live voice call. They solve adjacent problems.

What does Memrise cost?

On iOS as of 30 July 2026: $24.99/month, $61.99/year, or $329.99 for lifetime access. The annual is substantially cheaper than ours and the lifetime option is worth considering if you plan to keep at it.

Which should I use first?

Memrise, if you do not yet have the words. There is no point practising delivery of vocabulary you do not have. Come to us when the words are in there and will not come out.

Do the native-speaker videos really help?

They are the closest thing in an app to the experience of realising that nobody speaks the way your textbook does. If that is your specific frustration, Memrise addresses it more directly than anything else here.

Saygood is nearly here.

It is with Apple for review right now. Leave your email and we will send you one message on the day it goes live — nothing before, nothing after.

One email, on launch day. No newsletter, no sharing it with anyone. See our privacy policy.

Compare Saygood with something else