Health & wellness
SteadyEar — Self-Serve Tinnitus Program
A self-serve, flat-price tinnitus app that gives people with ringing ears the CBT and sound therapy clinics sell for $500–1,000.
In plain English
- What category is this?
- Clinics, coaches, and consumers buy for care, fitness, or wellbeing workflows. Here the focus is consumer health and wellness.
- The idea, briefly
Build the whole structured CBT and sound-therapy program sold directly to the person with tinnitus, with no clinic, no provider account and no annual plan: one small flat or one-time price, progress tracking kept by the user, and a free sound library that never locks behind a provider. This is a positioning and pricing wedge, not a new capability: Oto, MindEar and ReSound already ship the same two ingredients (sound + CBT), so it stands only on removing the provider gate and the price.
More ▾- What buyers expect
People comparing tools like Oto, MindEar, myNoise expect the basics to work without surprise fees or missing pieces. The loud complaints are: Oto removed self-serve buying, so the app stops working for people who cannot get a participating provider; and the structured CBT app was priced far above other apps and users cancelled.
More ▾
- Sources
- 15
- Checked
- 14
- Competitors
- 4
- Gaps
- 7
- Page checked
- 14 · 93%
- Snippet only
- 1 · 7%
- Documented
- 10 · 77%
- Interpreted
- 3 · 23%
- pricing6
- market4
- complaint3
- revenue2
Competitors
4- Oto$138/mo
- MindEar$58.99/mo
- myNoise$5/mo
- ReSound Tinnitus Relief$6.99/mo
Parsed from public pricing blurbs (entry paid tier when available). Max in set: $138/mo.
| Competitor | From | Free tier | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| Oto | $138/mo | Yes | joinoto.com✓ |
| MindEar | $58.99/mo | Yes | apps.apple.com✓ |
| myNoise | $5/mo | Yes | apps.apple.com✓ |
| ReSound Tinnitus Relief | $6.99/mo | Yes | apps.apple.com✓ |
What customers complain about
7| Gap | Src |
|---|---|
Oto removed self-serve buying, so the app stops working for people who cannot get a participating provider. | |
The structured CBT app was priced far above other apps and users cancelled. | |
The medical system offers tinnitus sufferers nothing, so they self-treat. | |
Requiring a paid provider is perceived as a con, poisoning trust in the category. | |
Even a $70/year charge for the useful part of a sound-therapy app triggers anger in a population that already spends heavily on hearing care. | |
Some tinnitus users explicitly prefer free tools over paid programs. | |
Access to face-to-face CBT, the best-evidenced treatment, is slow and expensive. |
Documented Interpreted
How competitors find customers
3| Tactic | Src |
|---|---|
| Oto publishes a high-intent 'Best Tinnitus Apps of 2026, Compared by Evidence' page that puts every competitor side by side and ends by framing its own clinic-led care as the one… | joinoto.com✓ |
| MyNoise uses a free, ad-free web library as the funnel and converts a slice of visitors into voluntary one-time donations for lifetime access, | mynoise.net✓ |
| MindEar spun out of university tinnitus research and used press coverage (the homepage shows a 'FEATURED IN' press block; | mindear.com✓ |
Your angle & pricing wedge
| Piece | Claim | Src |
|---|---|---|
| Angle | The whole structured CBT and sound-therapy program sold directly to the person with tinnitus, with no clinic, | |
| Wedge | Mechanism: sell self-serve at a flat or one-time consumer price (target about $29/year or $39 one-time) and drop the clinic markup entirely, | joinoto.com✓ |
How others got traction
3| Move | Why | Src |
|---|---|---|
| Oto launched direct-to-consumer, free with a 7-day trial then a monthly subscription; | Founder/company-attributed origin: the founders are former military doctors with tinnitus and the July 2022 funding article says the app wa… | pharmaphorum.com✓ |
| MyNoise gives its full soundscape library away on the web and monetizes voluntarily, | Founder-attributed on the donation page: the creator says 'I keep myNoise free for everyone. In exchange, | mynoise.net✓ |
| MindEar turned university tinnitus research into a consumer app and leans on mainstream press plus… | Company-attributed: the opened homepage calls MindEar 'A clinically-proven program' and shows a 'FEATURED IN' press block and a university/… | mindear.com✓ |
Market heat
Oto reports 200,000+ program enrollments and a 4.7 App Store rating on its homepage (company-reported).
Oto raised £2.8M ($3.3M) seed funding led by Octopus Ventures with Y Combinator participation, and the article states tinnitus affects one in seven people worldwide.
More ▾ReSound Tinnitus Relief shows 19,000 App Store ratings at 4.7 with a $6.99/mo or $69.99/yr plan.
Oto's own US App Store listing shows 848 ratings at 4.7 and a '90 Day Tinnitus Tune Out' in-app purchase at $137.99.
Revenue signals
4| Signal | Src |
|---|---|
Oto raised £2.8M ($3.3M) seed led by Octopus Ventures with Goodwater Capital and Y Combinator, after about £510k pre-seed, | pharmaphorum.com✓ |
Documented list prices across the category: Oto $500-$1,000 per clinic plan and $137.99 per 90-day App Store purchase; MindEar $5.99/mo to $68.99/yr; | joinoto.com✓ |
Market size: tinnitus affects one in seven people worldwide, and the opened coverage notes NHS waits of up to nine months and expensive private prices for the… | pharmaphorum.com✓ |
A Reddit r/tinnitus user reportedly wrote, 'While I avoid using apps that you have to pay for, | reddit.com· |
Should you build this?
The opening is a self-serve option. Oto pulled its direct subscription, so its app now will not work without a participating provider, and users are publicly cancelling over the $552/year equivalent and calling the provider requirement a con. The hard part is the free floor: ReSound gives the full sound library and exercises away free, myNoise gives its website away for a donation and sells a one-time $14.99-$19.99 unlock, and the evidence for CBT itself is generic.
More ▾
All sources
15| Source | Kind | Status | Accessed |
|---|---|---|---|
| pricing | page checked | 2026-10-04 | |
| market | page checked | 2026-10-04 | |
| pricing | page checked | 2026-10-04 | |
| complaint | page checked | 2026-10-04 | |
| pricing | page checked | 2026-10-04 | |
| market | page checked | 2026-10-04 | |
| pricing | page checked | 2026-10-04 | |
| revenue | page checked | 2026-10-04 | |
| pricing | page checked | 2026-10-04 | |
| pricing | page checked | 2026-10-04 | |
| complaint | page checked | 2026-10-04 | |
| revenue | page checked | 2026-10-04 | |
| complaint | snippet only | 2026-10-04 | |
| market | page checked | 2026-10-04 | |
| market | page checked | 2026-10-04 |