Photomath's own pricing page will not tell you what you get for your money. I checked it while writing this, and the free column, the monthly column and the annual column list the same three features as each other: step-by-step explanations, custom visual aids, and extra "how" and "why" tips.
Three tiers. One feature list. The page shows you a price difference and no product difference.
So the honest answer to whether Photomath is free has to come from somewhere other than the page built to answer it. Here is what I found, current as of August 2026.
Yes, and more genuinely than most of the category
The free version solves problems and shows you the steps, with no daily cap on how many. That last part matters more than it sounds, because a lot of "free" tools in this space mean free until your fourth question of the day.
Photomath's App Store listing puts it plainly, describing step-by-step explanations as "included in our basic version (at no charge)." The steps are not the upsell. For a category where the steps are almost always the upsell, that is the important fact and it has been true for years.
I should say plainly that I work on a competing math solver, so weigh what follows accordingly. It also means I have spent a lot of time reading these pricing pages, and Photomath's free tier is genuinely one of the better ones.
Why the answer matters to so many people
This is not a niche product with a confusing checkout page. It is one of the most widely installed education apps there is.
Photomath passed 220 million downloads by 2021, and the company's own site has reported solving billions of problems a month and adoption by over a million educators. On the App Store it currently holds a 4.8 rating from around 733,000 ratings, with an Editors' Choice badge.
So the pricing confusion is not a rounding error affecting a few hundred people. It is a subscription decision put in front of an enormous number of students, most of them teenagers spending someone else's money, on a page that does not distinguish the tiers.
What you actually get without paying
From the store listing, the free tier covers:
- Camera scanning of a printed or handwritten problem
- Step-by-step explanations
- Word problem instructions
- Interactive graphs
- Video learning
- Multiple solution methods for the same problem
- An advanced scientific calculator
That "multiple solution methods" line is the one I would point a student at. Seeing the same equation solved two different ways is one of the few things that reliably converts an answer into an understanding, and it is free.
What $9.99 actually buys
Photomath Plus runs $9.99 a month or $69.99 a year on the company's site, which works out around $5.83 monthly if you commit to the year. The App Store shows in-app purchase tiers at $5.99, $7.99 and $9.99, so what you are charged appears to depend on the plan and possibly the region.
What the subscription adds, according to the store listing and Photomath's help documentation, is narrower than the price suggests:
- Animated Tutorials. The help pages describe more than 400 of these, built to simulate how a teacher would work a problem on a whiteboard.
- Textbook Solutions. Worked answers keyed to specific textbooks, so you can look up problem 14 from your actual assigned book.
- Deeper explanations on top of the free steps.
Textbook Solutions is the real product here. If your homework is "do the odd numbers on page 213" from a common textbook, that feature does something the free tier cannot. If your homework is a worksheet your teacher wrote, it does nothing for you at all.
So the upgrade question is not "do I want better maths help." It is "is my coursework keyed to a textbook Photomath has indexed." That is a yes or no you can answer in about a minute, and it should decide the purchase.
The thing the pricing page costs you
Worth dwelling on the identical-columns problem, because it is not a trivial design slip.
A pricing page exists to let someone decide whether to pay. When all three columns list the same features, the page cannot perform its only function, and the actual differences are documented in help articles and an app store listing instead. A student trying to work out whether to spend $70 has to go and read three other pages to find out.
Probably not deliberate. My guess is the page went unmaintained after the Google acquisition closed in June 2023, and nobody has owned it since. Which is understandable, and also beside the point. A fifteen-year-old weighing up seventy dollars does not care why the page is unhelpful.
The catch that has nothing to do with money
Photomath is a phone app. That is the whole distribution story, and it has been since Microblink launched it in Croatia in 2014.
There is no browser version. The company's site offers App Store and Google Play links and nothing else. So if your homework is open on a laptop, being free does not help you: you are picking up your phone, photographing your own screen, and reading the answer on a second device.
This is also why searching for "Photomath online" turns up a field of unaffiliated clones with similar names. They exist because the demand is real and the official product does not serve it. Be careful what you type your homework into over there, because none of those sites are Photomath and none of them inherit its accuracy.
What free costs you everywhere, including here
One honest limitation applies to every tool in this category, this one included.
Photomath's own help pages acknowledge that its solving methods may not match what your class was taught, explaining that its mathematicians keep the most commonly used approaches rather than all of them, and inviting users who "have learned a different method" to write in. The same pages concede that "mistakes may happen sometimes."
That is a more candid disclosure than most of the category offers, and it points at the real cost. A free correct answer in an unfamiliar method is worth less to you than a slower answer in the method you are being marked on, and it is exactly the thing teachers notice when work arrives using steps the class has never seen.
So should you pay?
For most students, no. The free tier does the thing you came for, without a cap, and the paid tier is mainly a textbook lookup service. Buy it if your assigned textbook is indexed and you are working from it nightly. Otherwise you are paying $70 a year for animations.
The more useful question is not which tier to buy but what you do after the steps appear, and that is where every one of these tools, free or paid, stops being able to help you. Reading a correct solution is not the same as being able to produce one, which is the line between a solver helping you and replacing you.
If you are on a laptop and want the same thing without the phone, that is the gap our own step-by-step calculators were built for, and the graphing side is worth a look too if you have been using Photomath's interactive graphs and want them on a full screen. Either way, run the steps, close the page, and redo the problem blind. That habit is free in every product on the market, and it is the only one that changes your grade.