A free Lumosity alternative:
genuinely free, honest about results, two minutes a day

The "free" problem with Lumosity

Lumosity is a subscription business. The free tier gives you three games a day from a small rotating set; the rest of the 50+ game catalogue and the personalised daily training programme sit behind Premium, which currently runs around £11.99 a month or £59.99 a year depending on your region. The free tier is a sample; the real product is paid.

There is nothing wrong with that as a business model. It just is not what people mean when they search "free Lumosity alternative". They mean: a brain-training app where the actual game I want to play is free. Blanked is built around that model. The Blanked+ subscription exists, but it is closer to a tip jar than a gate: it removes ads and unlocks cosmetics. The core six game modes and all 400+ levels are free with or without it.

The honesty problem with Lumosity (and the wider category)

In 2016 the US Federal Trade Commission fined Lumos Labs $2 million for deceptive advertising. The claims at issue were that Lumosity could prevent memory loss, dementia, and Alzheimer\'s, and that it could improve performance at school and work. The FTC found those claims were not supported by evidence. Lumos Labs paid the fine, the marketing was rewritten, and the product carried on with more careful language.

We mention this not to pile on, but because the underlying scientific question matters and most brain-training apps still tiptoe around it. The honest research consensus, summarised in Simons et al. (2016) for Psychological Science in the Public Interest, is that brain-training games reliably improve performance on the trained tasks and on closely related tasks, with weak evidence for broader transfer to general cognition or daily life. We have a full write-up of this on /does-brain-training-work.

Blanked is upfront about this. We claim visual-memory practice improves visual memory, which the research supports. We do not claim it prevents dementia or boosts IQ, which the research does not support. The honesty is part of why Blanked exists.

What you actually get with Blanked

• Six game modes. Classic scene recall (study a scene, the screen blanks, answer questions). Speed Recall (time-pressured visual recall). Snap Match (spot the difference between two scenes, from memory). Sequence (reproduce the order things appeared). Counting Blitz (rapid counting under load). Colour Chain (memorise and recall a colour grid).
• 400+ levels across multiple worlds. Difficulty ramps gradually. Most players reach the Mastermind world after a few weeks of daily play.
• Two-minute sessions. Designed for adults who do not have fifteen minutes a day for brain training. Habit research is unambiguous that shorter daily commitments stick better.
• Head-to-head friend challenges. Send a friend the same scene with the same questions and compare scores. Lumosity has leaderboards but no direct-comparison mode.
• Blink, a mascot. Lumosity does not have one. Most adults find this either charming or beside the point; we lean charming.
• Genuinely free. No paywall on the actual game. No daily-game limit.

Where Lumosity might still suit you better

This page is not a hatchet job. There are real cases where Lumosity is still the right call.

• You want training across many cognitive domains (attention, problem solving, language, math) rather than visual memory specifically.
• You value the larger published in-house research programme (with the FTC caveat in mind).
• You are happy with a fifteen-minute daily session and a polished personalised programme.
• You need Android. Lumosity is on both iOS and Android; Blanked is iOS-only at the moment.

For a deeper side-by-side, see /compare/lumosity. For the broader landscape (Peak, Elevate, BrainHQ, NeuroNation, Impulse, CogniFit), the compare hub covers each one individually.

How to switch (if you are currently on Lumosity)

• Cancel the Lumosity subscription in your Apple ID settings (Settings → your name → Subscriptions) at least 24 hours before the next renewal date.
• Download Blanked. The first session takes about a minute, walks you through the basic mechanic, and asks if you want notifications. The full game is unlocked from level one.
• Set a tiny daily anchor. Two minutes after your morning coffee, on the bus, before bed. The shorter the better; consistency is the whole game.
• Run the free visual memory test now to set a baseline, then again in three weeks. Trust the change in your own score over time more than absolute level comparisons.

The free, honest version.

No paywall on the core game. No deceptive claims. Two minutes a day.

Frequently asked questions

Keep reading

Related: the in-depth Blanked vs Lumosity comparison, the parallel Peak alternative page, the broader free memory game for iPhone page, and the honest does brain training actually work? write-up.