What is missing, on purpose
These are not features that have not been built yet. They are decisions, and each one has been asked for at least once:
- No feed, no comments, no profiles. Nothing you do in Cardinal is performed for anyone. There is nobody to perform for.
- No streaks, no badges, no missed-day guilt. Nothing keeps score. A path moves forward when you finish a reading, never when the calendar does, so putting it down for three weeks leaves you on the next day rather than behind.
- No ads. Not a banner, not an interstitial, not a sponsored plan.
- No account. No name, no email, no password, no sign-in. You open the app and you are reading.
- No paywall on the Bible. Reading Scripture is free in thirteen translations and always will be.
What you get without paying anything
Free in Cardinal is not a trial and not a teaser. It is most of the app:
- The whole Bible in thirteen translations, eight of which read and search offline from the first launch
- Quiet Time, the guided daily sitting, and every one of its nine curated paths
- A custom reading path built from whatever you describe, with no quota on it
- Memorize, both practice modes, and more than fifty curated verse packs
- All seventeen Journeys over 3D satellite terrain
- Sermon notes, verse notes and the prayer list
- Narrated audio, home and lock screen widgets, and the Apple Watch app
- Thirty of the most-asked questions about the Bible, answered in full, plus three questions of your own each month
So what does a subscription pay for?
Two things cost real money every month, and a subscription covers those two things rather than unlocking arbitrary parts of the app.
The first is publisher-licensed translations. The New King James, New American Standard, Christian Standard and New Living Translation are licensed, per reader, from the companies that own them. The second is the AI behind Ask, which costs something every time it answers.
On top of those, Cardinal Pro covers reading two translations side by side, a deeper AI reflection on a sermon point, and editing your own studies. That is the whole list.
What happens if you stop paying
Editing a study is part of Pro. Reading and exporting one never is, so a lapsed subscription leaves years of preparation readable rather than hostage. A promise kept in the source code: Cardinal will not write your sermon. The study, the structure, and the words stay yours.
Nobody is watching you read
What you underline, what you pray about and what you ask are some of the most private things a person has. Specifically, and with no stronger claim than the app can back:
- No advertising identifiers and no cross-app tracking, which is why Cardinal never shows the iOS prompt asking to follow you.
- Your writing stays yours. Sittings, notes, prayers and highlights live on your device, and with iCloud on, in your own private iCloud rather than on a server anyone here can read.
- Photos you scan for a verse are read on the device and never uploaded.
- Payment is handled entirely by Apple. Cardinal never sees a card.
- There is anonymous, aggregate product analytics and Apple Search Ads install attribution. Neither identifies a person and neither follows anyone across apps. Saying "no tracking at all" would be a nicer sentence and a false one.
Only what you deliberately ask ever leaves. When you use Ask, your question and the surrounding passage are sent to be answered. Publisher-licensed text is never sent: the model reads a public-domain rendering, and only the name of your translation travels with the question.
Who this is actually for
If a streak is what gets you to open a Bible, Cardinal will feel empty, and there are good apps built around that. If a feed of what your friends highlighted is the point, this is the wrong app on purpose.
It is for someone who wants to read Scripture, sit with it, and talk to God, and wants the software to get out of the way while they do.