App pricing
BrainHQ costs $14 a month or $96 a year on its own site. Buy it inside the iPhone or iPad app and you pay $13.99 or $94.99, because Apple sets its own price for in-app purchases. Underneath that sits a free tier, and it is a small one: a single exercise a day, which stops once you have earned five stars on it.
Free, no account needed.
Daily Spark is the main free option. One exercise, once a day, played until you earn five stars, and then it is done until tomorrow. The stars are their way of keeping score. BrainHQ's homepage also has four sample exercises you can try without paying.
The rest of the library — dozens of exercises across attention, memory, and processing speed — sits behind the subscription. That is enough to take it for a spin and find out whether the games suit you. It is not enough to build a habit on, and habit is the thing that makes any of this work.
BrainHQ's own site lists a personal subscription at $14 a month or $96 a year, which comes to $8 a month if you pay for the year up front. Subscribe through the iPhone or iPad app instead and it is $13.99 a month or $94.99 a year, per the App Store listing.
Both routes buy you the same subscription. A dollar or two either way should not decide anything, but the gap is real, and it is worth knowing which screen you are looking at when you compare.
BrainHQ.com: $14/month or $96/year
iOS App Store: $13.99/month or $94.99/year
The subscription is $14 a month or $96 a year on brainhq.com. Through the iOS app it is $13.99 and $94.99.
If you hold the yearly subscription, BrainHQ lets you add family members for $59 a year each, according to its own support pages. It only works on top of an annual plan, and there is no month-to-month version of it.
A lot of people come to this page because they are buying for a parent rather than for themselves. If that is you, $59 is the number to do the arithmetic on, and it is a year of commitment at a time — you cannot take the family option for a spin the way you can the single subscription.
Not directly. BrainHQ's sound exercises use tones and short syllables to train processing speed and attention.
That is worth pulling apart, because it is the whole question on this page. Amplification is hearing. What you are after is listening, and listening happens with our brain — it is like anything else that our brain has to learn. BrainHQ works on the general machinery. Following one voice while a room talks over it is a narrower skill than that, and real life never sounds like one person.
So if your goal is conversation in noise, practice built on real speech with background noise you move yourself is the closer match. We go into that in more depth on our BrainHQ alternatives page.
Depends what you are after. If you want brain-training games, this is a mature product with a big library, and you can play one exercise a day for nothing, indefinitely, before you decide anything at all.
If what you actually want is to follow conversation in a noisy room, spend a week on the free exercise first and see whether it feels like the thing you have been missing. Where people run into friction with any of these apps it could be price, it could be depth, it could be audio quality. With BrainHQ, for this particular goal, it tends to be fit rather than any of those.
And if you have never practiced listening in background noise before, or you do it rarely, it is going to be that much harder when you encounter it out in the wild. That is the gap worth spending money to close, wherever you end up spending it.
FAQ
$14 a month or $96 a year for a personal subscription, per BrainHQ's own site. The iOS app charges $13.99 a month or $94.99 a year instead, since Apple sets its own price for in-app purchases.
Yes. It is called Daily Spark, it is one exercise, and you get it once a day for as long as you like. The homepage also has four sample exercises to try. Everything else in the library needs the paid subscription.
Yes, but only on top of the yearly subscription. Each additional family member costs $59 a year, per BrainHQ's support pages.
Apple sets its own price for in-app purchases, which can land a little below or above what a company charges on its own site. BrainHQ's iOS app shows $13.99 a month and $94.99 a year, just under its $14 and $96 website prices.
Not directly. Its sound exercises are tones and short syllables, built to train processing speed rather than to put you in a noisy room with someone talking. If following one voice through a crowd is what you are after, look for practice made from real speech with noise you can turn up and down. Ours works that way, and so do several others.
Related reading
Real voices, real sentences, and background noise you move yourself. Your first 7 days of SoundSteps include full access, with no card to start, so you can take it for a spin rather than committing to a high cost first.
Free, no account needed.
