Policy

Fair usage

Last updated 23 August 2026. A Kikase subscription is one flat price with no add-ons and nothing extra to buy, so a small daily ceiling is what keeps it that way. This page explains exactly what we count, what we don't, and roughly where the ceiling sits — so you can check it against what the app shows you rather than take our word for it.

1. The short version

Every story you play costs us real money — a language model writes and judges it, and a speech model performs it. Those costs are per use, not per subscriber, so an app with no ceiling at all is one automated script away from a bill that the other subscribers end up paying for.

Rather than raise the price for everyone or meter you by the message, we set a daily ceiling high enough that ordinary use never reaches it. If you play a story or three a day, you will not meet these limits. They exist for the extreme end, not for you.

2. What counts as usage

Three things cost us money each time they happen, so those are the three things we count.

• A reply you send inside a story. Each one is read by a language model that works out whether you're on track, corrects what you got wrong and writes the character's reaction. A typical Kikase story takes about eight replies from start to finish.
• Opening a story that has never been opened in your language and level. Our stories are written once in English and then rendered into the language and reading level you picked. The first person in the world to open a given story in, say, Portuguese at B1 triggers that work.
• Spoken audio nobody has heard before. Every line a character speaks is performed by a voice model the first time it is ever said.

3. What is always free

This is the part worth knowing, because it's most of what you actually do. We keep a permanent copy of everything we generate, so we only ever pay for it once — and anything served from that copy costs you nothing against your allowance.

• Replaying a story you have already played. Every line of it is already written and already recorded.
• Any line another learner has already heard in your language. Once a story has been rendered and performed, it stays that way for everybody, permanently.
• Reading, re-reading, and scrolling back. Text costs nothing to show again.
• The practice games. Fix the Sentence, Word Match, Scramble, Emoji Build and the review deck all run on material you have already played. None of them touch your daily allowance.
• Browsing the library, switching languages, and everything else in the app.

4. Why it resets daily

A monthly allowance sounds more generous and behaves far worse: one enthusiastic weekend can leave you locked out for three weeks, and you have no way to feel how fast you're spending it. A daily ceiling means the worst case is that you wait until tomorrow.

Everything resets at midnight UTC. The app shows you the exact time remaining rather than making you work it out.

5. Where the limits sit today

We publish these as approximate story counts rather than raw technical numbers, because stories are the unit you actually think in — and it is the same unit the meter in the app uses, so the two always agree.

• About nine full stories a day. This is the one that stops play. In practice it is around eight replies per story, so a shorter story goes further and a longer one less far.
• About twenty-five stories opened for the very first time in your language, per day. Almost nobody meets this one: it only counts stories nobody has ever opened in that language and level, and it is only reachable in a language whose library is still cold.
• About twenty-four minutes of newly spoken audio a day. Replays don't count, so in a warm library this is far more listening than it sounds. Running out of audio does not stop a story — the story continues in text and you read and reply exactly as before.

These figures are current, not contractual. We would rather move them up as costs fall than promise a number we later have to defend.

6. Why the limits get roomier

Because generated material is kept forever, the same allowance buys more over time. The first learner to open a story in a given language pays for the whole thing; everyone who opens it afterwards gets it free, and so does that first learner on every replay.

In a language whose library is still filling up, a day's audio allowance might cover three or four stories. In one that has been well travelled, the same allowance covers fifteen or more — without us changing a single setting. Nothing you have to opt into; it simply gets better as the library fills.

7. One allowance per account

The daily allowance belongs to the account, not to each profile on it. A household running three child profiles shares one pool between them. That is deliberate — it is what keeps family profiles included at no extra cost rather than sold per seat — but it is worth knowing if several people use Kikase on the same account on the same day.

8. What happens when you reach it

Nothing is lost and nothing is taken away. A story in progress is saved exactly where you left it, your streak is safe, your library and your review deck are untouched, and everything comes back at the reset.

You will not be asked to buy anything, because there is nothing to buy — there are no credit packs, no top-ups and no higher tier. Waiting is the only thing that changes the situation, so the app says so plainly and gets out of your way.

9. Changes to this page

We may adjust these limits as our costs change, and we will update this page when we do. If a change makes the allowance materially smaller, we will tell subscribers before it takes effect. Questions are welcome at support@kikase.app.

This page describes how we run the service in practice. Your contractual rights are in the Terms of Service; how we handle your data is in the Privacy Policy.