Mental math is one of the best 30-second workouts your brain can get — and the App Store category was overrun with ads, IAP gates, and addiction loops. BrainBlitz is the speed-math quiz we wanted to play. So we made it.

The problem with math apps

Try this: open the App Store, search “mental math.” You’ll get a hundred apps. Almost all of them follow the same playbook — a free tier capped at three problems, a $9.99/month subscription to remove the cap, an interstitial ad after every fourth question, and a notification at 9am every day asking if you’ve done your daily streak. Tap any one of them and you’re three taps away from a paywall before you’ve answered a single problem.

That’s not a math app. That’s a casino with arithmetic on top.

The thing the category forgot is that mental math is genuinely fun in 30-second doses. There’s a clean feedback loop — problem appears, you compute, you answer, the timer rewards you or punishes you, repeat. It’s the same satisfying loop as Tetris or Wordle, just with addition. The category had buried a great little game under a pile of monetization debris.

What BrainBlitz is

A 30-second timed round of arithmetic. You see a problem (e.g. “47 × 8”), tap the right answer from four choices, your timer goes up by a little for correct and down by more for wrong. The round ends when the clock hits zero. Your score is how many you got right.

That’s the whole game. Now here’s what makes it actually replayable:

• 7 difficulty tiers, from Warm Up (single-digit addition) through Unbeatable (3-digit multiplication, mixed operations, no time bonus). The progression is steep enough that nobody gets stuck and nobody gets bored.
• Time bonuses for streaks. Get five right in a row and your timer ticks slower. Miss one and you eat a full second of penalty. The honest math: if you sandbag at an easier tier, you can’t actually score higher than someone playing the right level — the bonuses scale with tier difficulty.
• Per-tier high scores. You don’t have one BrainBlitz score; you have seven. Unbeatable: 41 means something different than Warm Up: 41, and the game knows it.
• Detailed stats. Average answer time, best streak, total answered — all per session, none of it sent anywhere.

What it isn’t

BrainBlitz is the studio’s anti-pattern catalog made into a product. It does not have:

• No ads. Not interstitial, not banner, not “watch a video to skip the timer.” You bought the app, you play the app.
• No subscription. $0.99 once, forever. The unlock is the same on day one as day five hundred.
• No daily streak shame. Some weeks you don’t want to do mental math. The game won’t guilt-trip you back. There’s no notification chain trying to keep you addicted.
• No internet required. Offline-first. Plane, subway, dead-zone parking lot — works the same.
• No tracking. Your average answer time stays on your phone. We don’t want to know.

The free trial that respects you

You get three free games to try BrainBlitz. After that, the unlock is $0.99 — or you can earn more free games by voting on a Siono poll or sharing the app with a friend. Both options are honest: the poll takes 30 seconds and you genuinely tell us something useful, the share is one tap and goes through your normal share sheet (no auto-spam to your contacts).

If you don’t want to do either and you don’t want to pay, that’s a totally legitimate position and we built the app around respecting it. Delete the app, no hard feelings. We’d rather have 100 happy non-customers than 100 trapped subscribers.

Who it’s for

People who do mental math at the grocery store and enjoy it. People with a five-minute commute who want a brain warm-up before work. Parents teaching kids that arithmetic can be fast and fun, not a worksheet. Anyone tired of math apps that treat their brain like a slot machine.

It’s a game first, a brain trainer second, and a vehicle for monetization a distant zero. We hope you crack Unbeatable someday. We do not have a notification ready to remind you about it.

Try it

Three free games, $0.99 to unlock forever, no subscription, no ads. iOS and Android, offline-friendly.