Mochi Cards Alternatives: Who Should Stay, Who Leaves

Stay on Mochi if what you want is a markdown notebook with spaced repetition built into it. It is free forever with unlimited cards, Pro runs $5 a month, and it writes cards with AI now. Leave only if you need a document of your own turned into questions you answer and are scored on.

One correction first, because our own research notes were out of date on this point: Mochi ships AI card writing today, and its pricing page meters that AI in tokens.

Every Mochi figure here comes from the pages we read on 22 September 2026, with the app version shown as 26.9.2. Where a page said nothing, we say nothing.

Does Mochi have AI card writing?

Yes. The Mochi pricing page carries a metered line called AI completion and describes it as a feature that “Makes cards and rewrites text with AI.” The same page opens with “Upgrade to Pro when you want to sync, publish and use the AI services.” On the Mochi home page the matching feature heading reads “AI generated text”, under the line “Create example sentences or study prompts using the latest AI models.”

Here is the honest shape of it. What those pages describe is a metered assistant living inside a card editor, sitting alongside a row of other metered services: a dictionary that “Looks up a word and puts the entry on a card.”, translation that “Translates the selected text in the editor.”, transcription that “Turns an audio attachment into text.”, text to speech that “Makes audio from the text on a card.”, and image search that “Finds an image for a card and attaches it.” Nothing on the pages we read takes a document you upload and hands back a finished deck.

How big is the free AI allowance?

Small. Free gets “5,000” tokens of AI completion a month and Pro gets “500,000”, a hundredfold gap. One rule governs the whole of the comparison table on the Mochi pricing page: “Every limit below is per calendar month, and resets on the first of the month.” The Mochi FAQ says when that reset lands and what it does to anything you saved up: allowances come back “At the start of each calendar month. Unused amounts do not carry over to the next month.”

Running out is metered per service, and the cards you already made stay put. The FAQ answer reads “That one service stops until the limit resets. Cards created before the limit was reached are still available.” The other allowances are worth reading as a group.

We did not measure how many cards 5,000 tokens buys, and the pages do not say, so treat the free AI as a taste of the feature and the Pro figure as the working allowance. What sits outside the meter is the same on both tiers: cards and decks and offline use are listed as unlimited on each, and card templates and import and export are listed as included on each.

What does Mochi cost?

The pricing page opens with a promise worth quoting whole: “Mochi is free forever, and no sign-up is necessary.” Its next line names the fork: “Upgrade to Pro when you want to sync, publish and use the AI services.” Free is listed at “$0” and “forever”, carrying “Unlimited offline usage”, “Unlimited cards and decks” and “Import and export”.

Pro is listed at “$5” “per month”, captioned “billed annually”, with a “Pay monthly” and “Pay yearly” toggle and the note “Yearly billing saves you $12 a year.” Pro adds “Sync across devices”, “Publish decks”, “Dynamic fields”, “AI integration”, “Email support” and “Support indie software”. Dynamic fields are described as a feature that “Fills card fields automatically from a data source.”, and API keys let you “Read and write your cards from the HTTP API.” Cloud storage is listed as “Local only” on Free and “10 GB” on Pro. Documentation and a forum are open to both tiers, and email support is Pro only.

Set that against our own price list, because this is where Mochi wins on the monthly tier. GeniusPal Student is $14.99 a month, close to three times Mochi Pro at $5 a month billed annually. Our annual plan is the one place the two price lines meet: GeniusPal Genius is $59.99 a year, and twelve months of Mochi Pro at its annual rate comes to $60. One cent apart, over a year. Paying Mochi month to month costs more: $60 plus the $12 that yearly billing saves is $72 a year, which is $6 a month. On the free side the gap is starker again: Mochi Free gives unlimited cards and decks with no account at all, where the GeniusPal Free plan allows two study-set generations for the lifetime of the account. Two, then nothing. All prices here are US dollars.

Who should stay on Mochi

If you want a markdown note-taking app with spaced repetition attached, Mochi is the thing you already want, and the sensible move is to stay. Its own one-sentence description of itself is exact: “Take notes and make flashcards using markdown, then study them using spaced repetition.” The tagline under the name is “Spaced repetition flashcards made easy”.

Reach is the next reason to stay. Mochi is “Available for Mac, Windows, Linux, iOS, and Android”, with a “Try it online” option as well, and the footer download menu lists a desktop build, a mobile build and a web clipper. “Local first” is a headline feature on the home page, which states that “Your data is stored safely on your device”. The FAQ repeats the promise in plain terms: “Your cards and notes stay on your device and remain fully usable offline.” The same FAQ is asked whether an account is required, answers no, and continues: “Download the app and start making cards. An account is only necessary for the Pro features, such as sync and the AI services.”

The feature list around all that is long, and GeniusPal has none of it: card templates, References, which Mochi describes as a way to “Link notes both ways to build a connected web of ideas and discover new relationships.”, tags, “Filters and views”, “Built-in dictionaries”, “Text-to-speech”, “Image search”, “Auto-translate”, import and export, plus deck publishing and an HTTP API on Pro.

What sends people looking for a Mochi alternative?

Four reasons come up, and each one lands somewhere different.

• You want the review intervals exposed as dials you can turn. Mochi studies cards by spaced repetition, and the pages we read name no scheduling settings. That search is the one our comparison of RemNote and Anki works through, and the longer history behind it sits in our piece on the alternatives to SuperMemo.
• You want one app for coursework, projects and cards. Mochi is built around notes and the cards that come out of them. When the notebook is the bigger half of the job, our look at Notion and Obsidian for students sets that pairing side by side.
• The free AI allowance ran out in the first week of the month. 5,000 tokens is a taste of the feature. Pro at $5 a month billed annually is the cheap fix, and it costs a third of what GeniusPal Student does.
• You want questions written from a document, then graded. The boundary between the two categories of tool is the subject of our comparison of AI study apps and flashcard apps.

Two of those four have answers inside the flashcard category, and one is really a notebook question. Only the last needs a tool that reads a document for you, which is the category GeniusPal sits in.

Where GeniusPal loses to Mochi

The losses go first, because several of them are decisive and nothing later in this post reverses them.

On price, Mochi wins twice over. Free is free forever with unlimited cards and decks and no sign-up, where the GeniusPal Free plan stops after two study-set generations for the lifetime of the account. Pro is $5 a month billed annually against our $14.99 a month for Student. Our annual Genius plan is the single place we match Mochi, at $59.99 a year against $60, and a cent is the whole of it.

On reach, Mochi wins outright. GeniusPal has no offline mode and no local-first storage. It has no desktop app for Mac, Windows or Linux, no phone app, and no browser extension or web clipper. It has no import, no export, no Anki export, and no HTTP API. It has no card templates, no built-in dictionaries, no translation, no transcription, no text-to-speech, no image search, no note references or tags, and no deck publishing. It also runs no OCR, so a scan or a photo with no text layer is refused at upload.

What GeniusPal does with a document

One job. Upload a PDF, Word file, PowerPoint, plain text, Markdown or CSV up to 10 MB, or paste a link, and it writes a study set of questions from that material. A free set is ten questions, all of them multiple choice, and you get two full runs of it. Student at $14.99 a month raises the allowance to 100 generations a month and unlocks flashcard mode, recall mode, written quiz answers, and sets of up to 30 questions. Genius is $59.99 a year.

Two details around that are worth knowing. Every attempt reshuffles the question order and the option order, so a repeat sitting cannot be cleared on the memory of where the correct option sat. And a daily review is free on every plan, drawing up to 20 questions from across your sets, led by the ones you got wrong or have not tried.

There is also an exam style. Upload a past paper of your own and the questions written from your notes follow that paper’s shape. A free account reads one past paper for the lifetime of the account, Student ten a month, Genius thirty. Be realistic about how far it moves things on a free account: the shape shows up most in written answers, which need a paid plan, so a multiple-choice set changes much less. It predicts nothing about what will appear on your exam.

Which tool matches the job you have?

Match the tool to the job. If you are writing notes in markdown and want cards to come out of them, stay on Mochi, and stay on the free tier until sync or the AI allowance becomes the thing you miss. Once one of those does, Pro at $5 a month billed annually costs a third of GeniusPal Student, and it lands within a cent a year of GeniusPal Genius.

If your problem starts with a file somebody else wrote, a lecture PDF, a set of slides, a chapter export, and what you want back is a set of questions with a score at the end, that is the job GeniusPal does. Read the two-generation free limit before you sign up, because it is the number most likely to disappoint you, and Mochi has no equivalent of it.

Plenty of people will end up running both, with the notebook in one and the graded set in the other. Nothing about Mochi makes that awkward: export sits on its free tier, and that free tier keeps your cards on your own device.