What Auditory Training Actually Costs

Where people run into friction with any of these, it could be price, it could be depth, it could be audio quality, so the price on its own is a poor way to pick between them. Every number here came off the product's own site, its US App Store listing, or both. Prices move, so check before you pay.

A few of these cost nothing, ever, not even after a trial period. WordSuccess, from Advanced Bionics, and ReDi, from MED-EL, are free word and sentence practice apps, and both work with any brand of cochlear implant and any brand of hearing device. Cochlear CoPilot is free too, but only if you have a Cochlear-brand cochlear implant and an iPhone.

Angel Sound is on the list because it costs nothing and it has been around a long time. Be honest with yourself about the design, though. It is dated enough that plenty of people bounce off it before they get anything out of it.

These let you in the door and then charge for full access. You download, you work through the early part, and then you hit the wall for premium.

How much you get before that happens is the thing to check. Hearoes opens its early activities. eargym gives you a slice of its games. BrainHQ hands you one exercise a day and keeps handing it to you, which is thin but it does not run out. Prices below come off each app's US App Store listing.

eargym's second app, eargym CI Rehab, is for cochlear implant users and costs a good deal more. You can pay by the month or once for lifetime access.

LACE AI Pro is not the only one-time purchase on this page — eargym CI Rehab sells lifetime access for $149. What sets LACE apart is the size of the price and how you buy it: about $499, paid once. You buy an account rather than downloading the app — usually from a hearing care provider, sometimes from an online retailer. Some providers fold it into a care plan at no extra cost to the person using it, so ask yours before you pay retail.

The natural reaction to a $499 price tag is that it is so expensive you cannot even try it out, and that is a fair reaction, because there is no free tier to test it with first. Our LACE AI Pro review looks at where its studies came from. If $499 rules it out, our LACE alternatives page has cheaper and free options.

SoundSteps is ours, so read this line knowing who wrote it. The free version runs in any browser with nothing to install, and your first 7 days include full access with no card. After that Premium is $9.99/month or $89.99/year, and the free version keeps working either way. If you decide it is not for you, you are not trapped and it is not a surprise.

The price tracks how the program reaches you more than it tracks what is inside. Apps you find and download yourself compete for your card the way any consumer app does, so most have a free tier and sit under $15 a month. A program sold through a hearing care provider is priced against that relationship instead of against an app store listing, and it can ask for a lot more, because the provider is doing the selling.

The free ones are free for a different reason again. They come from the companies that made your cochlear implant or your hearing aid, and you listening well is already worth something to them.

Everything on this page except LACE AI Pro lets you take it for a spin before you pay, one way or another. Use that. Then give whichever one you pick a couple of weeks of steady use before you judge it, because a first session tells you about the interface and almost nothing about whether it will help.

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, and none of these are a silver bullet, at least for most people.

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. 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.