What Articulation Station costs now that it is Articulation Hive

The price, plan by plan

Every plan starts with a 14-day free trial and the download itself costs nothing, so you can see the whole app before any money moves. On the App Store the in-app purchases are listed as Hive Parent and Hive Pro at exactly those figures.

The yearly Parent plan works out at about $7 a month, which is the number worth comparing against anything else you are considering. The monthly plan is there for a short burst of practice over a school holiday.

What happened to the app you already bought

Little Bee Speech's support page is clear about this: if you had already downloaded the free or Pro version of Articulation Station Classic, you can keep using it, and you can redownload it from your Apple account. What you will not get is updates. The company says Classic will not be kept up with current and future versions of iOS, and will get no new features.

In practice that gives the old app a shelf life rather than an expiry date. It works until an iOS release breaks it. Saved student data can be transferred from Classic into Hive, which is the migration path the company wants you on.

What you get for the subscription

There is no Android version, and there never has been. Little Bee Speech has only ever shipped Apple apps.

• Practice from isolation up to conversation level, so the same app carries a child from single sounds to running speech.
• About twice the activities and content of the old app, which is the reason Little Bee gives for rebuilding it.
• Cloud progress tracking, so a child's data follows the account instead of sitting on one iPad.
• iPhone, iPad, Mac and Apple Vision, needing iOS or iPadOS 16 and macOS 13 on Apple silicon.
• A 4.5-star rating from about 538 ratings on the US App Store, on version 1.8.8.

Is it worth $83.99 a year for a parent?

It depends on who is running the practice. Articulation Hive is a clinician's tool: it gives you the words, the pictures and the recordings, and you decide whether each attempt was right. That is exactly what a speech-language pathologist wants, and exactly the judgement most parents do not feel able to make. If your therapist uses Hive and wants you drilling the same lists at home, the subscription buys you continuity, and that is worth paying for.

If nobody has trained you to hear the difference between a good R and a nearly-good R, you are paying for content you cannot fully use. Weigh that against the alternatives before the trial ends.

Cheaper ways to do the same practice

We make Help Me Talk, so treat that row as interested rather than neutral. The honest version: it covers 30 sounds with over 6,000 words, phrases and sentences, it runs on Android, and it tells your child how close they got rather than leaving you to decide. It is not an assessment tool and no therapist is going to run a caseload on it. Our free practice word lists for every speech sound cost nothing and need no app at all.