Three homework apps, three different ways of drawing the line. Photomath names the thing you get for nothing. Brainly names the thing you do not get for nothing. Mathway names neither, in the shortest of the three descriptions.
All sentences below are copied from the descriptions each company submits for its own store listing, so the wording is theirs, including the parts that read like an accident.
App onePhotomath says what is included, twice
Photomath, in the middle of its own description.
The same claim appears again as a bullet further down: “Step-by-step explanations included in our basic version (at no charge)”. That repetition is the useful signal. The paid tier is named separately, and it is named with things rather than amounts: “Photomath Plus can get you there with custom Animated Tutorials, detailed Textbook Solutions, and more!”
What that buys is a difference a student feels at 10pm. Steps for free; the animated walk-through of why a step happens, and the textbook-linked solutions, on the paid side. Photomath also puts its billing rules in the listing, including the sentence that applies to the plan rather than the app: “A subscription automatically renews unless it’s canceled at least 24 hours before the end of the current billing period”.
App twoBrainly names the upgrade, and prices it per day
Brainly, closing paragraph of its description.
Immediately after it: “Upgrade to Brainly Tutor for the full experience including live human tutors.” So the line is not drawn at the app, it is drawn at a named product inside the app — and “limited features” is left undefined. There is no list of which features are the limited ones.
The price is phrased as a habit rather than a bill: “Less than a dollar a day for unlimited access.” And the promise attached to it is the one a parent should read twice, because it is a claim about an outcome: “See real grade improvement in four weeks — or we’ll make it right.” The refund line that follows is equally blunt: “Not satisfied? Full refund within 30 days. No questions asked.”
App threeMathway makes the largest claim in the shortest text
Chegg’s Mathway listing, description of 144 words.
Unlimited is the word doing the work, and nothing in that description says what it is unlimited under. The next relevant line is conditional in a way worth noticing: “If a premium subscription option is selected:” — followed by “Payment will be charged to iTunes Account at confirmation of purchase” and “Subscription automatically renews unless auto-renew is turned off at least 24-hours before the end of the current period”. What the premium option adds is not in the text.
The practical instruction is clear enough: “Simply point your camera and snap a photo or type your math homework question for step-by-step answers.” The camera is the product. Whether the answer you get is the free kind or the paid kind is a question the description leaves open.
| App | What the listing says is free | What it says costs |
|---|---|---|
| Photomath | Named: “basic step-by-step explanations”, stated twice | Named: Animated Tutorials, Textbook Solutions |
| Brainly | Named only as “limited features” | Named: “live human tutors”, priced “less than a dollar a day” |
| Mathway | Not stated | Referred to as “a premium subscription option” with renewal terms, no contents |
Four questions that work on any homework app listing
- Does the word “free” have a noun after it? “Free with limited features” is a different promise from “step-by-step explanations at no charge”.
- Is the paid tier described by contents or by amount? Contents you can compare; a price per day you cannot.
- Is there a sentence about renewal? If the listing carries one, the plan is recurring; if it also carries a guarantee, read the guarantee’s conditions outside the listing.
- What does the app actually receive from you? These three describe a photo of a maths question, a child’s question typed into a network of tutors, and a camera pointed at homework. Those are three different amounts of exposure for the same Tuesday night.
The middle groundA step is not the same object as an explanation
All three apps use the phrase “step-by-step”, and the reason the phrase is worth pausing on is that it can mean two quite different things. The narrow version is arithmetic laid out in order: line one, line two, answer. The wider version is the reason each line follows. Photomath’s own description states the distinction better than a reviewer could: “Math isn’t just about an answer. It’s about every step along the way.” and then the mechanism, “That’s why Photomath breaks down each step, so you can *really* learn.”
Photomath’s listing, describing what an animated step is for.
“The exact progression of a particular step” is the interesting clause, because it describes the thing a static list of lines cannot: not what the line says, but how you get from the previous one to it. Whether your child sees that for free depends on where the boundary falls. The description says plainly that “Step-by-step explanations included in our basic version (at no charge)”, and it introduces Animated Steps in the paragraph above the sentence that ends with “Get basic step-by-step explanations at no charge when you download Photomath.” — which places the animated version somewhere between “basic” and “Plus” without ever saying where. That is the one question worth asking the app itself, on a real problem, in the first two minutes.
The rest of the feature list is stated as included, and reads as a reasonable inventory of what a maths helper should have: “Word problem instructions”, “Interactive graphs”, “Video learning”, “Multiple solution methods”, “Advanced scientific calculator”. The fourth of those is the underrated one. A method a teacher used and a method an app prefers both reach the same answer, and a child who only ever sees one stops recognising the question.
The shared assumptionBoth homework apps sell the same mechanism
Brainly’s listing, describing its own help flow.
Photomath says something almost identical about almost identical mechanics: “Scan any math problem with the Photomath app to get step-by-step explanations with accurate solutions and a variety of teacher-approved methods.” Two companies, one bet — that a student shown a worked solution will convert it into understanding.
That bet is true sometimes and false in a very predictable way. The conversion happens when the student has tried first and is reading the worked version to find the step where their own attempt went wrong. It does not happen when the photo is taken because a deadline is in ninety seconds, because then the explanation is not being read for its reasoning, it is being read for its content. Nothing in any of these three descriptions addresses that, because it is not an app problem — it is a household rule problem, and the rule is worth setting before the app is installed rather than discovering during a test.
Tutors, and the word “monitored”Where Brainly is different
A heading in Brainly’s listing, followed by the claim it introduces.
The claim under it is unusually specific for a store description: “Your child gets help from real, qualified tutors backed by AI – not a chatbot pretending to teach.” and then the safety line, “Every interaction is monitored and 100% kid-safe.”
Those are the strongest claims in this whole comparison, and the strongest claims are the ones worth interrogating, not because they are likely untrue but because a store description is not where their conditions live. “Monitored” means somebody, or something, reads the exchanges — which raises three questions the listing does not answer: who does the reading, what happens when something is flagged, and whether a tutor can see anything beyond the problem. “Qualified” invites one more: qualified by whom, since no body is named. And “100%” is the kind of absolute a parent should expect to be explained somewhere other than a marketing paragraph, because if it were literally true it would be the headline of a research paper rather than a clause in an app description.
The same pattern appears in the outcome promise. “See real grade improvement in four weeks” is a claim about a result, and the sentence attached to it is a remedy rather than a method — a money-back route if the result does not arrive. That is a fair arrangement and also, structurally, a way of not having to say what the four weeks assume about the child’s starting point, the subject, or how many evenings a week the app is actually opened. Compare it with the plainest thing any of these listings says about coverage, “K-12 coverage that grows with your child.” — a claim about scope, which is checkable in a minute, against a claim about effect, which is not.
Five questions to ask of any of themOn the phone, with the child
Ask these before the first paid month, not after the first bad grade
- Open a problem the child has genuinely attempted. Does the app show where that attempt went wrong, or does it silently substitute its own solution? Only the first of those teaches anything.
- Which part of what you are reading is the free version? Ask the app, not the description, and ask it on a real screen with a real question.
- If a human is in the loop, who is watching the human, and what is the record of the exchange?
- Can the child explain the step back to you an hour later, without the screen in front of them? That is the only test of “understanding” available at the kitchen table, and it takes ninety seconds.
- What does the school already pay for? A surprising number of districts license a maths platform that does the same job, and a household subscription bought next to it is buying the same evenings twice.
One asymmetry across the three listings deserves naming, because it is the most useful thing here for a parent deciding where to spend attention. The two longer descriptions make claims about outcomes and about supervision; the shortest description makes the largest claim about access — “Mathway gives you unlimited access to math solutions that can help you understand complex concepts.” — and offers the least detail about what that access is unlimited across. Length in a store description is not evidence of honesty. But a listing that spends most of its words on a promise, and very few on the mechanism, is telling you where its marketing team thinks the risk lies.
These are descriptions, not price lists. None of the three states what a plan costs in your currency today, what “limited” excludes, or whether a school already pays for the account you are about to buy. The in-app plan screen and the store’s subscription summary are the authorities for that, and they are worth one screenshot before money leaves the household.
- All quoted sentences — the three app descriptions as submitted by Photomath (listed under Google LLC), Brainly sp. z o.o. and Chegg, Inc., retrieved through the store’s public catalogue interface and compared word for word with this page.
- Two store images — supplied by the developers; the captions transcribe the headline text on each.
- Our own reading — the comparison table and the four questions. Not vendor guidance, and not a review of any plan we purchased.
The app pages here are Photomath and Brainly, on the learning and education hub. Related: how to use Duolingo for free and what you miss, is OCR free, or does extracting text cost extra, and which kids’ learning app has no ads at all.
Written by the Dlzer editorial desk. Not affiliated with, endorsed by or sponsored by Photomath, Brainly or Chegg. Product and company names are the marks of their owners, used to identify them; quoted lines are each company’s own description of what it does.