Reading app price index, Q4 2026: what 26 book, audiobook, tracker and recap apps cost in the US

1How much do reading apps cost in late 2026?

A library card is still $0. Paid ebook and audiobook subscriptions in the US run from $7.99 a month (Kobo Plus Read or Listen) to $28.99 a month (Everand Deluxe), and one audiobook credit you keep costs between $9.56 (Audible's 24-credit annual plan) and $15.99 (Audible bought inside the iPhone app). Reading trackers are free to use, with optional paid tiers from $29.99 to $80 a year. Magic Bookmark, the one recap app priced per book, costs $1.40 to $4.99 per book on top of whatever the book cost you.

Checked 2026-11-04. All prices in US dollars, before tax.

2What we found, in numbers

We recorded 82 rows of price data for 26 apps and services: 37 from official web pricing or help pages and 45 from US App Store in-app purchase lists. - No headline price went up. Of the 44 price points we had already published on our sites, 38 are unchanged on 2026-11-04. None of the six that moved is a straightforward price increase. - Two plans changed shape at the same price. Everand's $11.99 Standard plan now includes 1 title a month, per Everand's help center, with new Plus ($16.99, 3 titles) and Deluxe ($28.99, 5 titles) tiers, and its Legacy plan is closed to new members. Audible Plus is still $7.95 a month but Audible's help page says it is "available only for current Audible Plus members". - One service changed its name, not its price. Kindle Unlimited is now Kindle+, still $11.99 a month with up to 20 titles borrowed at a time. - The iPhone app can cost more. In 9 web and in-app pairs for the same plan, 4 cost more inside the iPhone app, 2 cost slightly less and 3 cost the same. The biggest gaps are Audible Premium ($14.95 on the web, $15.99 in the app, 7% more) and Audible Standard ($8.99 vs $9.99, 11% more). - Annual plans usually save 16% or more. Across 12 plans sold both monthly and yearly (for Audible and Libro.fm, the 12-credit annual plan against twelve months of the 1-credit plan), 11 save 16% or more by paying for a year up front. Libro.fm is the exception at 5.5%. Speechify has the largest gap: $29 a month or $139 a year, 60% less than twelve monthly payments. - Credit prices cluster around $15. Eight of the ten credit plans we charted cost between $12.00 and $15.99 per credit. Only multi-credit and annual plans fall below $12. - Every reading tracker we checked has a free tier. Nine paid tracker tiers cost from $9.99 once (BookBuddy Pro) to $80 a year (Literal Supporter). Three of them (The StoryGraph, Hardcover, Fable) charge exactly $49.99 a year. - Recaps are either free inside one store or paid per book. Kindle Recaps and Story So Far cost nothing extra but only work inside eligible Kindle ebooks. Magic Bookmark works with print, ebook and audiobook copies of its supported titles and charges one credit per book.

3What does one audiobook cost per credit, title or hour?

Audiobook services sell four different units, so a monthly price alone does not compare them.

Credits you keep. A credit buys one title that stays in your library after you cancel.

The cheapest credit is the one you commit to a year ahead in bulk. The most expensive is the one bought one at a time inside the iPhone app. Libro.fm and Audible's single-credit plans differ by four cents; Libro.fm's files are DRM-free and a bookstore you choose gets a share.

Titles you unlock while subscribed. Audible Standard is $8.99 a month for one title a month that you can play only while you stay subscribed. Everand Standard is $11.99 for 1 title a month, Plus is $16.99 for 3 ($5.66 each) and Deluxe is $28.99 for 5 ($5.80 each). Deluxe costs slightly more per title than Plus. Everand says unused unlocks roll over for up to six months, and unlocked books stay readable for as long as you are subscribed.

Listening hours. Spotify Premium Individual is $12.99 a month and includes 15 hours of audiobook listening from its subscriber catalog, which works out to $0.87 an hour, with music included. Spotify's Audiobooks Access plan is $9.99 for 15 hours ($0.67 an hour) with music on the free, ad-supported tier. Unused hours expire at the end of the month. As an example of the arithmetic, a 10-hour audiobook uses $8.66 of a Premium month or $6.66 of an Audiobooks Access month.

Deals with no subscription. Chirp says its deals start at $1, with "no subscription fees, credits, or waitlists". That is a floor, not a typical price.

Library apps. Libby and Hoopla are free with a participating library card. Hoopla's listing says "available titles, formats, and borrowing limits vary by library".

4What do ebook and audiobook subscriptions cost per month?

Catalog plans (Kobo Plus, Kindle+) get cheaper per book the more you read. At $11.99, Kindle+ works out to $11.99 a book at one book a month, $6.00 at two and $3.00 at four. Kobo Plus Read at $7.99 works out to $7.99, $4.00 and $2.00. Nothing stays yours when you cancel either one.

Free trials we saw on official pages: Audible 30 days, Kindle+ 30 days, Audiobooks.com 30 days, Kobo Plus 14 days and Spotify Premium one month at $0.

5Is it cheaper to subscribe on the web or in the iPhone app?

Often it is cheaper on the web, and the App Store listing is where you can check.

Two notes on that table. Audiobooks.com's in-app list also includes a $14.95 monthly item, so which price you see may depend on your account. Shortform's web page shows only "$16.42/mo, billed annually"; the $197.04 figure is twelve times that.

App Store lists also show prices that never appear on the web. Audible sells extra credits in the iPhone app at $15.99 each, or $39.99 for 3 and $59.99 for 5. Readwise Reader lists two monthly items ($8.99 and $12.99) and two yearly items ($95.90 and $119.99). Bookly lists at least ten in-app items (Apple truncates the list), including a $79.99 "Bookly Pro" that Apple's catalog marks as a one-time purchase rather than a subscription. Thus Far lists ten "Hosts+" items: nine subscriptions between $19.99 and $199 and a $0.00 lifetime item.

6What do reading trackers charge?

BookBuddy also sells optional Online Sharing at $1.99 a month or $19.99 a year (Standard) and $4.99 a month or $49.99 a year (Pro). Bookly's list also includes a six-month plan at $19.99 and a family plan at $9.99 a month. Basmo's list includes a $3.49 weekly item and a discounted $29.99 yearly item.

If you track more than a few books a year and want the paid features, the yearly plan is the better buy in every case above: savings range from 16.5% (The StoryGraph, Hardcover) to 49.9% (Bookly).

7What does a book recap cost?

There are three price models among the recap and spoiler-safe tools we checked. 1. Free inside one store. Kindle Recaps and Story So Far carry no separate fee. Amazon's announcement says they cover thousands of best-selling English-language Kindle ebooks in the US, on Kindle devices and the Kindle iOS app. They do not work for print books, audiobooks from other stores or ebooks from other stores. 2. Pay per book. Magic Bookmark (by Yomu Inc.) is free to download, the first Bookmark Credit is free, and each credit covers one whole book, with credits that never expire and no subscription. Packs on the US App Store: 1 credit $4.99, 5 for $19.99 ($4.00 each), 10 for $34.99 ($3.50 each), 50 for $69.99 ($1.40 each). It works alongside your own print, ebook or audiobook copy, for its supported titles only, on iPhone. Counting the free credit, a first purchase of a 5-pack covers 6 books at $3.33 each; that applies once. Separately, magicbookmark.com advertised a two-week free trial ("unlimited books, no credit card") when we checked on 2026-11-04; we record both offers as each source states them. 3. Pay to host, free to join. Thus Far, a no-spoiler book club app, is free to download; its "Hosts+" tier for club hosts is listed at $19.99 to $29.99 a month or $49.99 to $199 a year, most with a one-month free trial.

At two supported books a month on 10-packs, Magic Bookmark costs $7.00 a month. That is less than any paid ebook or audiobook subscription in this index, but it is an add-on: you still need the book.

8What do summary, read-it-later and text-to-speech apps cost?

• Blinkist: Premium is listed at $99.99 for 12 months (the page auto-applied a coupon showing $79.99 for the first year); PRO is $174.99 for 12 months ($139.99 as an intro offer). The iPhone app also sells Premium monthly at $15.99.
• Shortform: $24.00 a month, or $16.42 a month billed annually ($197.04 a year). In the iPhone app: $23.99 a month or $194.99 a year.
• Readwise: Full Readwise (Reader plus Highlights) is $9.99 a month billed yearly ($119.88); Reader only is $7.99 a month billed yearly ($95.88).
• Speechify: Premium is $29 a month or $139 billed yearly.

9What changed since our earlier checks?

We compared every price above with the figures already published on bestbookapps.com, readingtrackercompare.com and smartbookmarkcompare.com (read on 2026-11-04; their own dates range from 2026-08-01 to 2026-11-03). Every bestbookapps.com figure in the "Earlier" column has now been corrected on this site.

The only real price moves we have logged in 2026 remain the ones on our changes log: Audible's Standard plan at $8.99 (March 2026) and the Kindle+ rename at an unchanged $11.99 (October 2026).

10How we built this index

• Scope. Apps people use to get, borrow, track, summarize, listen to or recap books, sold in the US: 26 apps and services. We included every plan a US reader can see on the official pricing page and every item on the US App Store in-app purchase list, except duplicates and promotional variants, which we note instead.
• Sources. Official pricing pages and help centers, read live on 2026-11-04 with a US location; US App Store listings, read the same day (in-app purchase names, prices and, where Apple's catalog provides them, billing periods). Each row in the CSV carries the source URL, the source type and the exact text we read the price from.
• Double-check. A script confirms that every price in the dataset appears in the quoted source text for that row. Where a page showed only a monthly equivalent of an annual plan (Shortform, Readwise), we multiplied by 12 and say so in the row.
• Derived numbers. Cost per credit, title or hour is the plan price divided by the units it includes, rounded half up to the cent. Per-book figures for catalog plans are simple division at 1, 2 and 4 books a month, not a measure of what people read.
• Comparison with our sites. We read the live price pages on our own sites on 2026-11-04 and recorded, for each matching row, the earlier figure, where it appeared and the date it carried.

11Limitations

• US prices only, before tax. Prices differ by country and change without notice.
• We did not complete a checkout. A price on a pricing page or App Store list is what the seller advertises, not a receipt.
• App Store in-app lists show item names, not always the plan behind them. Some lists are truncated by Apple (Bookly, Everand, Thus Far), and some items are offers only certain accounts see.
• Spotify's Audiobooks+ add-on appears at $11.99 a month in a search-index excerpt of Spotify's page, but the price was not visible when we loaded the page, so it is in the data marked "excerpt only" and left out of the charts and comparisons.
• Kindle Recaps' price (free with eligible Kindle ebooks) comes from Amazon's announcement as read on 2026-10-27; we did not re-read it for this index.
• Catalog size, audio quality and title availability are not priced here, and they matter as much as the number.
• Promotions change daily. Where a page auto-applied a coupon (Blinkist), we report the list price and note the discount.