Crossword App With No Ads: Ad-Free Picks, Free and Paid (2026)

Most crossword apps with no ads are not free. When we checked every store listing on September 22, 2026, only two free apps carried no ad label: Forkyz on Android and Across Lite Crosswords on iPad. Everything else sells the silence one of two ways. Pay once and the ads are gone: Penny Dell Crosswords (Remove Ads, $19.99), Crossword Puzzle Redstone (Remove Ads, $34.99), Crosswords Classic ($9.99 paid app) and Black Ink 2 on Mac ($29.99). Or subscribe and the ads stay off while you pay: NYT Games, Daily Themed Crossword, Crosswords With Friends, Puzzle Page and Grid Genius Pro ($7.99 a month or $49.99 a year).

This guide is the honest version of that list. We say which apps interrupt your solve, what each one charges to stop, and which route is cheapest over a year. Grid Genius is in the table too, and its free tier shows ads. We are not going to hide that.

The short answer

A crossword runs on concentration. You hold three half-finished answers in your head, spot the crossing that unlocks them, and a full-screen ad lands on that exact moment. That is why "no ads" is worth paying for, and why the phrase hides a trap. Apps get you there in three different ways, and each way costs you differently.

• Free and ad-free. Rare. The two we could verify, Forkyz and Across Lite Crosswords, are open players: you bring puzzles from newspaper sites and .puz files, and nobody pays for a catalog.
• Pay once, and the ads are gone for good. The app is free with ads, and one purchase clears them. Penny Dell, Redstone, Crosswords Classic and Black Ink work this way. This is the cheapest route if you keep the app for years.
• Subscribe, and the ads stay off while you pay. NYT Games, Daily Themed Crossword, Crosswords With Friends, Puzzle Page and Grid Genius Pro. You usually get more than silence for the money: an archive, unlimited play, or in Grid Genius's case AI puzzles and hints.

One more distinction matters. A banner sits at the edge of the screen and does not stop you. An interstitial is the full-screen ad between puzzles, often with a countdown, and it is the one people mean when they complain. A rewarded ad is opt-in: you tap to watch it in exchange for a hint or coins, and nothing plays unless you choose it. When a listing says "Contains Advertising," it does not tell you which kind. The sections below do.

Ad-free crossword apps compared

Prices are from the US App Store listings on September 22, 2026. Google Play prices can differ by a dollar or two, and every app here except Forkyz, Across Lite, Crosswords Classic and Black Ink carries the "Contains ads" flag on Google Play as well.

Two apps left the table this round. The Guardian's standalone Puzzles app no longer appears on either store, and Shortyz, the open-source Android app, is gone from Google Play; Forkyz is its maintained fork. Wordscapes and CodyCross are word games rather than clue-and-grid crosswords, so they sit in the pay-once section below as cautionary examples rather than in this table.

The apps, one by one

Below is the ad story for each app, in the order most people ask about them. For the wider field beyond the ad question, our best crossword puzzle apps comparison ranks the apps overall, and best word games in 2026 covers the whole category.

NYT Games (ad-free with a subscription)

The NYT Games app is the home of the hand-made daily crossword, and the free games inside it are ad-supported. The App Store listing carries the Contains Advertising label, and the Times has said plainly that players without a Games subscription see ads around Wordle, Connections and Strands. The Mini crossword, free for years, moved behind the subscription in August 2025. The full crossword and its archive have always needed one.

So the route to silence here is the subscription. The App Store listing shows a $39.99 yearly plan and monthly plans between $4.99 and $6.99, and promo rates on nytimes.com change often. You pay for editorial quality: professionally built grids, the Monday-to-Saturday difficulty curve, and the biggest crossword community there is. You do not get custom topics, AI hints or a maker. If you are weighing it against Grid Genius, read Grid Genius vs the NYT Crossword.

Best for: purists who want the hand-crafted daily and are happy to subscribe.

Penny Dell Crosswords (one-time Remove Ads, $19.99)

Penny Dell brings the Penny Press and Dell magazine puzzles to your phone, with three free dailies (easy, medium, hard) every day. It has a quiet reputation, and that reputation is out of date. The App Store listing carries the Contains Advertising label and sells Remove Ads as a one-time $19.99 purchase, so the app is ad-supported until you buy the ads off. On Google Play the in-app purchases run from $2.99 to $49.99, so check the Remove Ads price inside the app before you tap.

What Penny Dell offers is the cleanest permanent exit among the big libraries. You pay once, there is no renewal, and the purchased puzzle collections are described on the listing as ad-free. The catch is the content model: the free dailies are the free part, and the deeper collections are paid packs in the $2.99 to $9.99 range. Look for it as Penny Dell Daily Crossword on the App Store and Penny Dell Crossword Puzzles on Google Play.

Best for: solvers who want trusted magazine crosswords and would rather pay once than subscribe.

Crossword Puzzle Redstone (one-time Remove Ads, $34.99)

Redstone has one of the largest free libraries of human-made crosswords on a phone, with named constructors, four difficulty levels and offline solving. It is ad-supported on both stores, and the App Store listing sells Remove Ads for $34.99, the highest one-time price in this guide. The rest of the in-app purchases are small puzzle packs from $0.99.

The math still works if you solve every day: $34.99 once beats a $39.99 yearly subscription in the second year. If you solve a few puzzles a month, the ads are the price of a large free catalog.

Best for: heavy solvers who want a big traditional library and a single payment.

Crosswords Classic (paid app, $9.99, no ad label)

Crosswords Classic from Stand Alone is the old-school iPhone and iPad answer: you pay $9.99 up front, the listing carries no ad label, and the app downloads puzzles from newspapers and opens .puz files. Puzzle packs from named constructors sell for $1.99 to $2.99, and a few premium sources need a separate subscription. There is no free tier to be ad-supported in the first place.

Best for: iPhone and iPad solvers who collect newspaper puzzles and want to pay once.

Forkyz (free, open source, no ads, Android)

Forkyz is a free crossword player for Android, licensed under the GPL and installed from F-Droid rather than Google Play. It carries no ads and no tracking, and it downloads puzzles directly from sources such as Newsday, Universal, USA Today, the Wall Street Journal weekend puzzle and the Guardian cryptic, plus any .puz, .jpz or .ipuz file you give it. It is a maintained fork of Shortyz, which left Google Play. F-Droid's only flag on it is that it connects to a newspaper's servers to fetch puzzles. Its version 86 shipped on September 12, 2026, so it is alive.

The trade is that it is a player, not a library. Nobody writes puzzles for Forkyz, and the interface is plainer than a commercial app. For an Android solver who wants zero ads and zero dollars, it is the answer.

Best for: Android solvers who want a free, ad-free player for newspaper puzzles and .puz files.

Across Lite Crosswords (free, no ad label, iPad)

Across Lite is the file format most published crosswords use, and its maker, Literate Software, has a free iPad app that opens them. The listing shows no ad label, the app is free, and a $4.99 premium upgrade and a few trainer puzzle packs are the only purchases. The compatibility section lists iPad and Apple Vision only, so it is not an iPhone pick.

Best for: iPad solvers who download .puz files and want a free, quiet player.

Black Ink 2 (paid, no ads, Mac)

Black Ink 2 from Red Sweater is a Mac crossword app: a 14-day free trial, then $29.99 to unlock it, with no ads at any point. It opens any Across Lite file and pulls puzzles from a list of online sources. It is the desktop answer to this question, and it is Mac only.

Best for: people who solve at a desk and want a native Mac app with no ads.

Puzzle Page (any purchase, or a subscription)

Puzzle Page is a daily page of mixed puzzles: crossword, codeword, sudoku, wordsearch and more. The free version is ad-supported on both stores, and people report an ad after every puzzle. The interesting detail is in the developer's help center: any coin or token pack, or a subscription, disables the banner and interstitial ads. The smallest pack is $2.99, which makes Puzzle Page the cheapest paid exit in this guide. The subscription ($5.99 a month or $35.99 a year) also unlocks the full daily page and the archive. One caveat from the same help page: if you delete and reinstall without cloud saving, the ads can come back.

Best for: people who want a mixed daily puzzle page and are happy to pay a few dollars once.

Daily Themed Crossword and Crosswords With Friends (VIP subscriptions)

These two are the coin-and-streak style of daily crossword: a themed puzzle each day, coins for hints, and a "VIP" subscription that lists No Ads among its benefits. Both listings carry the Contains Advertising label. Daily Themed Crossword's VIP subscription shows at $7.99 on the App Store, and Crosswords With Friends' subscription packs start at $5.99. Neither sells a one-time remove-ads purchase, so the silence lasts as long as the subscription does.

Best for: people who enjoy the pop-culture daily format and already want the VIP extras.

Grid Genius (ad-free with Pro)

Grid Genius is the AI crossword app, and the honest framing is that it removes ads behind a subscription. The free tier shows ads. Pro, at $7.99 a month or $49.99 a year, is ad-free. What is different is what sits around the silence: AI-generated puzzles on any topic you can name, AI Hints that rephrase a clue or add a related fact instead of revealing the answer, and a maker with a Word List Builder and a Freeform Editor that is free with no account. The next two sections cover it in full.

Best for: people who want a quiet solve plus puzzles on their own topics, hints that help them think, and a maker.

Free with no ads at all

People search for "free crossword app no ads" every day, and the truthful answer is that a free app with a deep catalog and no ads barely exists. Puzzles cost money to write, edit and serve. An app that shows you zero ads is being paid some other way: by your purchase, by your subscription, or by you supplying the puzzles yourself.

That last option is where the free ad-free apps live. Forkyz on Android and Across Lite Crosswords on iPad are players. They open the .puz files that newspapers and indie constructors publish, and they charge nothing because they carry no catalog. If you already have sources you like, they are the answer. If you want to open an app and be handed a puzzle, they are not.

Two more things to check before you believe a "free, no ads" claim on a listing. First, look for the Contains Advertising label on the App Store or the Contains ads flag on Google Play. Every large free library in this guide carries it. Second, look for a Remove Ads line in the in-app purchases. If it is there, the free version is the ad-supported version. Penny Dell is the usual example: it is remembered as the quiet one, and it sells Remove Ads for $19.99.

Grid Genius belongs in this section too. The free tier is real: a free daily challenge with a leaderboard and streaks, community puzzles, and a maker that works without an account. It shows ads. Watching an ad reward is one way to earn extra AI hints, and Pro removes the ads entirely. If you want a free ad-free crossword, we are not it, and we would rather say so than have you find out after the first puzzle.

One-time purchase vs subscription

If all you want is silence, a one-time purchase wins over any horizon longer than a year. Penny Dell's $19.99 Remove Ads costs less than six months of most subscriptions. Crosswords Classic at $9.99 is cheaper still. Redstone's $34.99 is the outlier, and even that beats a $39.99 yearly plan from the second year on. Puzzle Page's $2.99 coin pack is the cheapest exit of all, with the reinstall caveat above.

Three traps to read for before you pay:

• "Remove Ads" is not always permanent. CodyCross, the themed word game, sells "Remove Ads for 30 days" at $0.99 next to its CodyCross Premium subscription. Wordscapes' help center describes both permanent and temporary ad-removal offers in its in-game store, and neither is priced on the listing. Read the duration on the purchase sheet.
• Rewarded ads survive the purchase. Puzzle Page and Wordscapes both say you can still watch optional videos for coins after buying the ads off. That is fine, since nothing plays unless you tap, but it is not "no ads" in the strict sense.
• A subscription buys more than silence. NYT Games sells the archive and the full daily. Puzzle Page's subscription unlocks the whole page and 2,500 past pages. Grid Genius Pro lifts the caps on AI puzzle generation and AI Hints. If you want those things, the recurring price is buying them, not just the quiet.

The honest rule of thumb: pay once for a fixed library you will solve for years, and subscribe only when the subscription includes something you would pay for anyway.

How Grid Genius handles ads

Since this is a no-ads guide, we owe you specifics rather than a slogan. Here is exactly where ads do and do not appear.

The free tier is a real product, and it shows ads. Watching an ad reward is one way a free player earns extra AI hints. Pro removes every ad and lifts every limit. You are choosing how quiet you want it and how much you want to create, not unlocking the basic game.

The daily challenge is the cheapest way to find out whether the app suits you. It is free, and there is a global leaderboard and streak tracking. Play it for a week, try an AI hint on a clue that has you stuck, and then decide whether ad-free Pro is worth it. If you would rather build than solve, the free crossword puzzle maker on this site works without an account, and the app will generate an AI puzzle on any topic from play.gridgenius.app/create-puzzle. If you are weighing crosswords against a quicker daily habit, our crossword puzzles vs Wordle comparison is a good companion read.

How to choose an ad-free crossword app

Match the app to why you want the ads gone.

• You want zero ads and zero dollars. Forkyz on Android, or Across Lite Crosswords on iPad. Bring your own puzzles.
• You want classic puzzles and a single payment. Penny Dell's $19.99 Remove Ads for magazine crosswords, or Crosswords Classic at $9.99 for newspaper puzzles on an iPhone or iPad.
• You want a huge free library and will pay once. Redstone, with the $34.99 Remove Ads purchase, or Puzzle Page, where any $2.99 pack turns the ads off.
• You want the hand-crafted daily and a subscription is fine. NYT Games. Budget $39.99 a year at the listed price.
• You want zero ads plus AI puzzles on your own topics, AI hints and a maker. Grid Genius Pro, at $7.99 a month or $49.99 a year. Start on the free daily challenge and upgrade if the puzzles earn it.
• You solve on a Mac. Black Ink 2, $29.99 once.

By platform, the field looks different, because the open-source and paid-up-front options are split between the two stores. We keep separate guides to the best crossword apps for Android and the best crossword apps for iPhone and iPad, each with its own ad notes.

The honest summary: if all you want is silence, you have cheaper and cleaner options than any AI app, and we have listed them above. If you want silence and puzzles that are about the things you care about, Grid Genius on Pro is the bundle nobody else sells.

Frequently asked questions