Comparison

PiggyBankMath compared with XtraMath and Prodigy Math Facts

Written 10 September 2026 by Daniel, who built this

These three aren’t doing the same job. XtraMath is a fact fluency drill, free and built for a classroom. Prodigy Math Facts is the same drill hidden inside a pet racing game. PiggyBankMath attaches your own money to the practice and keeps the record. If all you need is fluency and you want to spend nothing, XtraMath is very likely your answer.

What each one is built to do

XtraMath and Prodigy Math Facts aim at the same target, which is automatic recall of the basic facts under addition, subtraction, multiplication and division. Both were designed with a teacher in the room, and in both cases the version a parent uses at home came second.

PiggyBankMath started from the other end. The question I was trying to answer wasn’t how to drill facts, which is a solved problem, but how to get a nine year old to sit down on a Tuesday. The math engine exists because the money needed something honest to pay for.

XtraMath

It’s a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, founded in 2009, and the pitch has been the same for years: ten minutes a day. A session opens with a short progress quiz and then runs two practice activities, across the four operations plus custom programs you can build.

The mechanic that matters is the fluency threshold. Students get six seconds to answer by default, and that window is adjustable. A correct answer inside it earns a smiley face. One outside it earns a green checkmark, meaning correct but not fluent, and doesn’t count toward the operation being learned.

That’s the same idea PiggyBankMath uses, and XtraMath was doing it at scale for a decade before I wrote a line of my version. Mine is stricter in a different way: a fact counts as mastered only after three consecutive fast, correct answers on at least two separate days. The belief underneath is identical, that a slow correct answer usually means fingers.

The free tier is a real free tier and not a trial. On 10 September 2026 the pricing page also showed a Family Pro plan at six dollars a year for three children, which mostly buys back customization the free plan limits. Prices move, so go and check it.

The complaint that comes up over and over in parent and kid reviews is the timer. Children in tears. A child who decides they’re bad at math because a progress bar ran out on a fact they knew. It’s also a drill by design, so there’s nothing to look at, which some children won’t tolerate and some parents consider the entire point.

For a lot of families XtraMath is simply the right answer, and I’m not going to pretend otherwise on my own website. It costs nothing, it has done one narrow thing since 2009, it is used across a large share of American elementary classrooms, and if your child will sit down and do it, you don’t need what I built.

Prodigy Math Facts

This one is new. Prodigy announced Math Facts in March 2026, so it’s about six months old as I write, which is worth knowing given how established the wider Prodigy game is. It covers the same four operations, runs in under ten minutes a day, and dresses the practice up as a pet race. The timer is hidden from the child on purpose, a direct answer to the complaint XtraMath collects.

Understand the shape of the free version first. It’s genuinely free for teachers, with the full fluency data. At home a student gets one Math Facts session per day at no cost, and unlimited sessions require a membership, which ran from roughly sixty to a hundred and twenty dollars a year depending on tier when I looked on 10 September 2026.

Prodigy's upsell is what parents object to most, and it has history. On 19 February 2021 a coalition of twenty two child advocacy and consumer groups, led by the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood, asked the Federal Trade Commission to investigate Prodigy for deceptive marketing, saying that in nineteen minutes of gameplay they counted sixteen membership advertisements against four math problems. A Prodigy spokesman told NBC News that the company was proud to give millions of students, families and schools completely free access to standards-aligned educational tools, and that, like every service with a subscription model, it surfaces the benefits of membership from time to time so that users know memberships exist. I found no public record of what the FTC did with it. That complaint was about the main game world, not Math Facts, which didn’t exist yet. Parents still raise the same objection in recent reviews, so it’s not settled history either.

What I’m not going to do is sneer at the game. A child who won’t open a drill will open a game, and for plenty of families getting the child to start is the whole problem. If pets and races produce ten minutes of subtraction in your house, no argument about intrinsic motivation should talk you out of something that’s working.

What PiggyBankMath does that neither of them does

The motivation is real money from you. Not coins, not pets, not a streak of gems. You set a rate per completed session, or per correct answer, and a daily earnings cap per kid, which starts at a dollar. The balance grows as they practice, and when cash changes hands you press Mark as Paid, for all of it or part of it. The app processes no payments and holds no money. It’s the shared record so nobody has to remember who owes what.

A round is ten questions for age seven and under, fifteen for ages eight to ten and twenty for eleven and up, and you can override that. The four operations are there, plus a mixed All Math round pulling from every operation you enabled. An optional five minute assessment places the child at setup and can be re-run later.

Two decisions I would want to know about as a parent. Hitting the daily cap stops the money and nothing else, so mastery, the streak and the progression keep recording, and payment at the boundary is partial rather than lost: ninety cents banked against a dollar cap and a twenty five cent session pays ten cents. And any manual change to a balance requires a written reason, which the child sees next to the amount.

Everything exports to a CSV in one click, the parent side is behind a PIN, and there’s no advertising, analytics or tracking of any kind. That last one is easy to promise when there is no business model yet to break it for.

Where PiggyBankMath is worse than both

Being specific is more useful than being modest, so: it has two users, both my children. XtraMath has been running since 2009 across an enormous number of classrooms, and Prodigy is used in tens of thousands of schools. I have a working app and a hypothesis, which isn’t the same category of thing.

It’s a web app, so there’s no App Store or Play Store listing. It installs to a home screen from the browser and that’s the whole story. It also does nothing for a classroom: no teacher reporting, no roster, no grades, nothing touching a school.

It’s not a game. There are no characters and no world. If money isn’t a motivator your child responds to, and for some children it genuinely isn’t, there’s nothing else here to hook them with.

And it asks something of you every week, which the other two don’t. You have to actually hand over the cash. An app tracking a debt a parent never settles is worse than no app, because it teaches the child that the record means nothing.

So which one

• Your child needs fact fluency and nothing else, and you want to spend nothing: XtraMath.
• Your child refuses drills and needs the practice hidden inside something fun: Prodigy Math Facts, on the one free session a day, and decide about a membership later.
• You’re a teacher, or homeschooling several children and needing reporting: XtraMath, and it’s not a close call.
• You already hand your child pocket money and would rather it was earned, and you want a record you both trust: PiggyBankMath.

Nothing stops a family running two of these. If the drilling already works and the problem is getting the child to start, the money is the part I would add, and I would leave the drill exactly where it is.