Hearoes Cost: What You Actually Pay for Full Access

The download stays free either way, and you get more than a splash screen out of it. You can get in and try the early activities. Then you hit the wall. Hearoes builds up through everyday sounds, syllables, words, and then sentences with noise behind them, and most of that ladder sits on the paid side.

It should be clear what is inside the activities before you pay for them. Free download, paid content is normal for game-style listening apps now, but Hearoes did not start out this way. It launched free and went paid later, which is why recipients in the cochlear implant forums still bring the switch up.

Three plans, all listed on the US App Store. Over a full year the yearly plan saves you about $20 against paying month to month. Not much, so do not let the discount pick the plan for you, and if you are still deciding whether it is for you, $9.99 is what it costs to find out.

Depends where you are. With a hearing aid or with a cochlear implant it is a new hearing experience, and it is like anything else that our brain has to learn — it is going to be more challenging when we first start. There is a period where our brain is adapting and getting used to the new experience, and hearing aids and cochlear implants are not a silver bullet, at least for most people.

If you are early in that period, the free activities are aimed squarely at you, and you can work through them without paying anyone. The subscription earns its money later, when sentences and background noise are the part you want more of.

eargym, another game-style app, is cheaper at around $3.99 a month on the US store (£3.99 on its own site). Its separate app for cochlear implant users, eargym CI Rehab, costs more: $49 a month, or $149 once. LACE AI Pro goes the other way. About $499, paid once, and you buy an account rather than downloading it — and the natural reaction to a $499 price tag is that it is so expensive you cannot even try it out. Then there are the ones that cost nothing at all. WordSuccess from Advanced Bionics and ReDi from MED-EL are both free, and both work with any brand of hearing device.

SoundSteps is ours, so discount this paragraph accordingly. You get seven days of free access to the full build, so that you can decide if it is for you rather than committing to a high cost first. If you decide you do not need all of it, you are not trapped and it is not a surprise. There is a free version underneath, no card to start, and Premium after that is $9.99/month or $89.99/year.

The free download tells you what you need to know about the game format. If you are newly activated with a cochlear implant, the early activities are the ones you want first anyway, and those are the ones you can reach without paying.

Then give whichever plan you pick a couple of weeks before you judge it. The appeal of building a consistent practice habit is that you have done the practicing and the preparation in a low-stakes, low-pressure place. And if you have never listened 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.