9 ms·

Parents outraged at Snoo after smart bassinet company charges fee to rock crib

111 points by pseudolus 2y ago

tehwebguy 2y ago
Makes sense, I’d guess most used Snoos probably get resold many times.
talldayo 2y ago
A tragic catch-22. You design and build the app-enabled internet rocker crib, but cannot justify supporting the app or the internet support without a subscription fee. Reminds me of the "Someone Who Is Good At The Economy Please Help Me" memes.
- upon_drumhead 2y ago
  No, I think this is greedier than that. > The company's founder, Harvey Karp, said the pricing change was necessary to "bring in revenue," noting that the company was not underwritten by a university or the government, and must survive on its sales alone. He said his ultimate goal would be to see the Snoo paid for by the government or by insurance companies, but it's unclear if there has been any substantive movement toward achieving that end. They want the government/insurance to buy them in bulk and then rent seek for everyone using them. There's zero reason why for the price this couldn't be done completely local and not cost Snoo a cent to run. They just don't want to because the long term strategy is to collect revenue forever.
  - idatum 2y ago
    I wonder too if the data collected via that subscription is useful to monetize somehow? Maybe like health data from your watch?
    - rolph 2y ago
      a rocking basinet is a pendulum, thus mass of the child may be determined on a day to day average, thus inference may be made, such as when larger clothes are a good ad to push.
    - clintonb 2y ago
      We had a Snoo for our kid. I cannot see how anyone knowing our kid was a poor sleeper when he was born, and improved over six months, would be worth anything to anyone. “Parents are sleep-deprived” is a pretty well-known fact at this point.
      - atoav 2y ago
        "Your kid is a worse sleeper than most other kids, for only 999,99 USD you can learn more a out the possible causes"
      - s1artibartfast 2y ago
        I think that would be pretty good data for advertising to desperate parents. Hell, the fact alone that they have a $1700 bassinet probably makes them a valuable target
  - nickff 2y ago
    Your quote doesn't contradict the parent comment. Snoo may need to "bring in revenue" because they're losing money. They may, simultaneously, want to have their product purchased in large quantities, as that would be another way to "bring in revenue".
  - johnnyanmac 2y ago
    The government can't even subdize child care. What interest would they have in buying a bunch of high tech baby rockers?
- uoaei 2y ago
  Tragic? You really think the company is the poor victim?? Company made choices, they were bad choices. Bad business deserves zero sympathy.
  - s1artibartfast 2y ago
    I don't have any problem empathizing with business mistakes. I have made bad choices both as an individual and as a company. Doesn't mean I am willing to subsidize them, but I get it.
    - talldayo 2y ago
      I was actually using irony to highlight how "helpless" companies act when they deliberately engineer a flaw that "forces" them to charge a recurring support fee. The scenario where they didn't consider this outcome is impossible; they knew they could charge a recurring fee by removing all physical controls. They did 90% of the work and charged you monthly for the remaining 10%, not because the last 10% is hard, but because you have no other choice. This is not a bad decision, but an intentionally insidious design pattern intended to separate owners from the functionality they paid for and own. The people that greenlit this design deserve to be held criminally liable. The business in this instance deserves no empathy.
      - s1artibartfast 2y ago
        meh, I dont have a lot of sympathy for users who buy devices with subscription functionality unless there is false advertising involved. IMO people need to grow a pair and stop buying crappy products. business policy would turn around over night if they did.
        talldayo 2y ago
        The fact that collectively we refuse to grow a pair ensures that bad business policy dominates us until we outlaw it.
etimberg 2y ago
Similar problems exist with the Nanit baby camera. It’s free to view the camera from the app but to view it from their website costs money. That being said if you know how to run docker you can just proxy the video feed to vlc pretty easily but most parents don’t have the time for that
- Laaas 2y ago
  Why not just use a normal camera?
  - _yb2s 2y ago
    The Dormi baby monitor app works extremely well, and you can install it on any old smartphone to repurpose as a baby monitor. For my son, I just velcroed an outdated phone with a worn out battery to the wall. It is really well designed because it also notifies if the connection is lost or if anything goes wrong, which a lot of expensive commercial cameras don't.
  - jimbob45 2y ago
    It has a few bells and whistles that are worth having. We combined a Nanit camera and an Owlet sleep sock and that gave us god peace-of-mind at night. I only wish we’d topped it off with an analog walkie talkie as a backup in case the Wi-Fi went down.
    - gred 2y ago
      We used a similar setup, but opted for two sets of analog walkie talkies (instead of one set), so that we could fall back to the secondary set if the batteries ran out in the first set (we replaced the batteries in the two sets of walkie talkies at one-month offsets so that they wouldn't run out at the same time). We also had the two sets running on different channels, to avoid concurrent outages caused by unexpected radio interference. We did the math afterwards; overall availability of the child monitoring system was four nines. Satisfactory.
- krisoft 2y ago
  I feel differently about that. (And it is possible that it is just because I don't understand what Snoo does) To view a baby camera over the internet someone has to run a server. To run that server costs money. (If you think that the actual server/bandwidth cost is negligible, make sure to also include the cost of keeping the team employed to maintain those servers.) Someone has to pay for that. Based on what you say it sounds like the Nanit baby camera degrades gracefully to the local only features if you don't pay the subcription. That is kind of the only honest way to run a business with a connected component. As long as they were up-front about this at purchase I can't see a problem with that. How is this different from Snoo? Quite frankly I don't see how the baby rocking function requires a remote connection. It should be totally implemented locally inside the basinet and there should be no on-going cost. Therefore the only reason they might lock the feature away is due to greed.
clintonb 2y ago
The market is saturated. Four years ago we could buy a new one for $1300 or buy used on Craigslist for $800. We went with Craigslist, and resold six months later for $900 (not a typo). The bassinet is well-made so it would be silly to throw it out after 2-3 kids. The fact that the resellers are other parents makes me trust a little more that they aren’t selling a broken/dirty bassinet, so why buy new for double the cost? They are a victim of their own success.
- dyauspitr 2y ago
  It depends. One of my rules is to never buy a secondhand mattress and I definitely wouldn’t buy one for my baby. I’m not sure off the mattress comes with this bassinet or not.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - _yb2s 2y ago
    This article mentions that the Snoo was designed to prevent SIDS, but the number one factor predicting SIDS is a used mattress... and interventional studies have proven it is not caused by other confounding factors like poor familes or second children being more likely to have used mattresses- It can be prevented with a new mattress or non-permeable mattress cover. The Snoo has an integrated mattress in a non-standard size, but you can buy new replacements from the manufacturer.
    - lolinder 2y ago
      > the number one factor predicting SIDS is a used mattress As a three-time parent who did extensive reading on SIDS prevention before the first one and brushed up before each of of the other two: What? Do you have a citation for this? Because my recollection is that all of these show up on the list of things to avoid for SIDS but a used mattress never featured once in my reading: * Smoking * Fuzzy stuff in the bed (stuffed animals, blankets) * Sleeping on stomach * Heat
taspeotis 2y ago
> The company's founder, Harvey Karp, said … the company was not underwritten by a university or the government, and must survive on its sales alone. Thanks for that primer on private enterprise…
- disillusioned 2y ago
  This is code for "our early investors are disappointed we didn't build in a subscription model to begin with."
uoaei 2y ago
You bought into a walled garden, now you're upset when the owner of that garden decides to do some landscaping. Something tells me people aren't really getting this whole "you need to own stuff to have control over it" thing.
- ximus 2y ago
  don't they own the crib after paying $1700?
  - _yb2s 2y ago
    [flagged]
  - userbinator 2y ago
    [flagged]
  - thrtythreeforty 2y ago
    Not quite, dear customer: You own the motionless hunk of plastic, and you only rent the functionality. See also streaming hardware, BMW heated seats, textbooks, and home security systems.
    - cwillu 2y ago
      Don't forget exercise equipment; last rower a friend bought required a credit card before it would let you adjust the tension.
    - pfisch 2y ago
      You don't have to pay the subscription to make it rock. The subscription just tracks sleeping hours.
      - spencerflem 2y ago
        The headline of the article contradicts this
_yb2s 2y ago
The SNOO is cheaply made and poorly engineered despite the incredibly high price- and there isn't much to it. It should cost ~$45, not the $1695 it actually costs. I recently rebuilt a used snoo myself for my newborn nephew, and was shocked to see that it is built to move everything on rubber rollers, and those rollers use the wrong material, so they both slip and grind to dust quickly. That said- it works. I would have given my right arm for one when my son was newborn and had "colic" and would literally scream continuously from 10pm to 4am everyday for months. I was up all night holding him by myself, using the method developed by Dr. Harvey Karp (who later founded SNOO)- which is exactly what the SNOO copies and replicates automatically, which is the only thing that would calm him. It was exhausting, and I started to hallucinate frequently, and make dangerously bad decisions from lack of sleep. I think the SNOO would have saved me.
- cwillu 2y ago
  > built to move everything on rubber rollers, and those rollers use the wrong material, so they both slip and grind to dust quickly. Sounds like it was designed deliberately to reduce the aftermarket supply. Maybe the first person can sell it, but avoiding the creation of a robust secondary market has been the dream of a great many MBAs.
  - dotBen 2y ago
    Or just wast built to the correct tolerances. We loved our Snoo but it had a life of about 4 months before our son grew out of it. It doesn't feel like those rollers need more than a year or two of life, even with multiple owners.
    - tourmalinetaco 2y ago
      That’s what they said. It’s only built to survive one, maybe two infants, but to avoid a secondary market the rockers purposefully fail. Both because it’s cheaper to buy material that won’t last, and because it makes prospective buyers more reliant on the manufacturer rather than a cheaper aftermarket supply.
  - 2y ago
sklargh 2y ago
Am I the only one who thinks this is unfair? If you use the Snoo successfully it gets you two-plus hours of sleep a night. That’s magical as a parent of a newborn. We’re talking about a critical app for a hardware device that has a lifespan of several babies (ours is going on six as it circulates among friends). We should reward people who make hardware so durable and effective that they’ve sold so many of them they need to find another revenue stream. We talk a lot in this community about maintainers getting paid. Here is a company within a ferociously regulated and risky market doing that.
- saagarjha 2y ago
  I suspect maintainers would complain a lot less if everyone paid them $1700 first.
- sowbug 2y ago
  Bassinets don't need maintainers.
kylehotchkiss 2y ago
> sensors that detect when the baby is crying and simulates the sounds of the womb to help keep babies I realize this may come off as a bit insensitive but isn't this taking away a chance to bond with your child? Children not being physically held enough at young age has lifelong implications
- Flop7331 2y ago
  Do you feel that way about shushing?
- dap 2y ago
  > I realize this may come off as a bit insensitive but isn't this taking away a chance to bond with your child? Having a Snoo doesn’t mean you never hold your child. Newborns provide many such opportunities. You don’t need to take them all. See the comment above about a newborn that needed this for 6 hours a night for months. > Children not being physically held enough at young age has lifelong implications Citation needed? This is the sort of thing that people use to argue against sleep training, too, but I don’t believe much evidence has been found for that.
  - grvbck 2y ago
    > Citation needed? This is the sort of thing that people use to argue against sleep training, too, but I don’t believe much evidence has been found for that. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4088358/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4088358/ https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.0504767102 https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.0504767102 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7502223/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7502223/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/9599775/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/9599775/ https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203758045 https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203758045 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8250458/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8250458/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33924970/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33924970/ https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-662-67860-2_7 https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-662-67860-2_... https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/14984130/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/14984130/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/infant-touch/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/infant-touch/
oldpersonintx 2y ago
new parents are so easy to scam, they all want the best for their new child, and they think that means blowing $$$$ on too-deluxe baby gear they will only use for a short period of time we fell for it...plonked down $$$ for the deluxe stroller...used it four times
- pfisch 2y ago
  That's fine, but the snoo isn't a scam. It works really well, and is far superior to any other bassinet on the market. If you value your sleep the snoo is worth it, and frankly I suspect there is a significant consumer base that would pay an even higher price for it.
- tshaddox 2y ago
  I’m curious why you only used the stroller 4 times. We also decided on a very expensive stroller and infant cat seat, and we’re pretty happy with them. Assuming the stroller continues to work well for 3ish years I think we’ll have no regrets. Of course, we don’t know how happy we’d have been with a cheaper option. That probably would have been fine too. But the build quality seems noticeable and it doesn’t feel like we got taken advantage of.
  - oldpersonintx 2y ago
    [dead]
stavros 2y ago
> The company's founder, Harvey Karp, said the pricing change was necessary to "bring in revenue, That sounds like a "you" problem.
_8L34K 2y ago
I'm not sure I understand the $1700 price tag. Self rocking bassinets can be had for a couple hundred dollars. Many have the same functionality, with cry detection and white noise capabilities. They also don't require the use of an app, it's just a self contained unit. Where is the 500% upcharge going?
- ronsor 2y ago
  The cloud, of course.
- pfisch 2y ago
  That is not true. Show me another self rocking bassinet like the snoo. Also the snoo does not require the app at all.
  - _8L34K 2y ago
    Just google "self rocking bassinet", but that is also why I asked - so if you are confident enough to say it's not true, then please explain. Does it just come down to a different controller/set of algorithms for governing the rocking/white noise capabilities? The product itself doesn't seem to cost $1700 dollars to produce - it seems to be a bassinet on rollers with a motor attached that can play sound.
  - MostlyStable 2y ago
    "like the snoo" appears to be the sticking point. What specific features do you think that A) are important for helping a baby sleep and B) are only found on the snoo? I've never used the snoo or any other self-rocking bassinet (luckily my daughter is a decently good sleeper on her own), but this product [0] certainly looks like it's pretty similar for a fraction of the price, and it's even from a known brand. [0] https://www.amazon.com/Graco%C2%AE-SmartSenseTM-Soothing-Baby-Bassinet/dp/B0CXG8NVBP https://www.amazon.com/Graco%C2%AE-SmartSenseTM-Soothing-Bab...
- mplewis 2y ago
  Parents will pay a lot of money to get six months of sleep.
sarchertech 2y ago
I bought a Miku camera because it has a few extra features that I wanted and unlike the competition there was no monthly fee. Well then they screwed up by pushing a bad over the air update that literally bricked all operating cameras. They made that right by replacing them all, but then they went bankrupt. A new company bought their assets during bankruptcy and the first thing they did was add a monthly fee to use any of the “advanced” features (all the reasons I bought it in the first place.)
- spartas 2y ago
  Ditto. If you’re able to run an old version of the Android app, then you still have access to all of the Miku features. I haven’t found a similar workaround for the iOS app. https://www.reddit.com/r/daddit/comments/17iuh6r/miku_camera_functionality_restoration/ https://www.reddit.com/r/daddit/comments/17iuh6r/miku_camera...
lolinder 2y ago
I can't even imagine spending $1700 on a bassinet in the first place. As the article notes, this thing gets used for ~5 months (6 if you're really pushing it) at which point the kid is done. If you're going to have another kid then you put it into storage for a few years before it gets a second round of 5 months of use (assuming the company you bought your smart bassinet from doesn't brick it in the interim). At its simplest, it's a tiny bed on wheels and you can pick one up for free from a local parent. If you want to get really fancy you can get a self-rocking bassinet for <$400. Who are these people who are willing to spend $1700 on a bassinet but then get outraged when the clearly-exploitative company decides to exploit them for another $100?
- id00 2y ago
  Used it for both of my kids. Both times we bought a used one for $800 and sold for the same price after it was no longer needed.
- px1999 2y ago
  The aftermarket for these things means that the cost winds up being split between multiple parties in a lot of cases. Anecdotally, most parents within my circle bought their Snoo used and sold it after use. I bought an unopened snoo from facebook marketplace for $X and sold it after 6 months for $X-200. I was a little annoyed that Happiest Baby is meddling with the resale value (because I was expecting to be able to sell it on after a few months of use) IMO even though the product is overpriced, I'd have happily paid 5k for the extra sleep I believe it gave me.
  - s1artibartfast 2y ago
    It would be an interesting case study on pricing and transaction costs to look at how much the resale value changes. Does it go down by the $100 people will have to pay in subscriptions? will it go down by more than that because people dont want to bother with the subscription as an extra cost?
- scruple 2y ago
  My wife's employer got us a rental for all of our kids. We had twins and it was amazing for them but around 3-4 months they were out of it and we returned it early. With our singleton, it didn't work at all. Kid hated it from day 1. We returned it after 3 weeks so that it wasn't eating up space in our bedroom.
rahimnathwani 2y ago
Happy Baby customers received an email in June alerting them to the change in pricing. Buyers who picked up a Snoo before July 15 were grandfathered into the previous structure, while anyone who bought after that was locked into the subscription model.
rzimmerman 2y ago
The Snoo is great and the key feature that actually helps prevent SIDS is the restraints and swaddle, which is not being moved to a subscription here. It's actually FDA approved to reduce the risk of SIDS. The "bonus" rocking and soothing noises just help parents get more sleep. The Snoo is very expensive and easy to pass down or buy used. I think they probably screwed up by selling it outright. You can rent the Snoo, which is probably a better model for everyone. This is kind of a janky way to pull back some of the rental revenue they lost by selling a durable product that people only need for a few months. It feels gross, I get it. But it's effectively a $100 per child fee which is quite reasonable given the benefits. And there's no realistic way to charge for that other than subscription for the premium (non-safety) stuff. The alternative is to keep developing new models with new features and adding crap people don't need. One thing I love about the original Snoo is that it works fine without an Internet connection or app. I used the app and it was great, but it's nice to know that when you travel or lose power, it can still rock your baby and soothe them. I hope that's still the case if there's a subscription involved.
- lolinder 2y ago
  > the key feature that actually helps prevent SIDS is the restraints and swaddle Just a note that the NIH guidelines specifically call out this marketing claim as BS: > Even though swaddling does not reduce the risk of SIDS, some babies are calmer and sleep better when they are swaddled. Even though swaddling does not reduce the risk of SIDS, some babies are calmer and sleep better when they are swaddled. They also call out the monitors specifically as also useless for SIDS and issue a general warning that products that claim to reduce SIDS are nearly-universally not useful and are often counterproductive. https://safetosleep.nichd.nih.gov/reduce-risk/reduce https://safetosleep.nichd.nih.gov/reduce-risk/reduce
- tshaddox 2y ago
  > And there's no realistic way to charge for that other than subscription for the premium (non-safety) stuff. The alternative is to keep developing new models with new features and adding crap people don't need. There’s another alternative: simply sell them for a little more than they cost. Just keep doing that. Solid business plan.
big-green-man 2y ago
[flagged]
- bankcust08385 2y ago
  Moral of the story: Don't give away significant % of one's salary so willingly without assurances to subsidize the adversarial gotcha capitalism game.
  - big-green-man 2y ago
    What do you mean?
    - bankcust08385 2y ago
      Spend less money and acquire things of durable value.
pvillano 2y ago
Why don't they just rent the thing entirely, six months at a time? Recurring revenue, tiered pricing, no secondhand market, and less waste from planned obsolescence.
- mtmail 2y ago
  They offer rental, too https://www.happiestbaby.com/products/snoo-rental https://www.happiestbaby.com/products/snoo-rental
- ilickpoolalgae 2y ago
  We rented but we know a lot of parents that didn't because they didn't want a "used" bed for their newborn. To each their own.
egypturnash 2y ago
Meanwhile Finnish babies sleep in the cardboard box that originally contained a government-supplied cache of baby clothes, pillows, blankets, and even a toy and book or two, while their parents are both given 160 days (32 five-day work weeks) of paternal leave to care for the kid. Capitalism!
- mtmail 2y ago
  Photo of the baby box and contents: https://yle.fi/a/74-20083915 https://yle.fi/a/74-20083915
- smabie 2y ago
  Yeah and Finish devs also make a small fraction of what's possible in America
  - Novosell 2y ago
    Dunking on the happiest country on earth, 7 years in a row, with "yeah well one of their professions makes less money". Nice.
ilickpoolalgae 2y ago
I took a look at the features that are locked out and they seem reasonable to be behind a subscription as they require costs to maintain. Almost all of the features that do not require some sort of cloud service connection seem to remain free. It's also free for people who use the rental option. Backlash is also understandable as they are changing the status quo. Disclosure: We rented a Snoo and it was made a huge difference between our first (no Snoo) and second child. https://www.happiestbaby.com/blogs/snoo/premium-app-features#:~:text=Premium%20Happiest%20Baby%20App%20Features&text=Level%20Lock%3A%20Keep%20SNOO's%20rhythms,a%20diaper%20change%20or%20feeding https://www.happiestbaby.com/blogs/snoo/premium-app-features....
- FireBeyond 2y ago
  What? Almost none of those features require costs to maintain: - Car Ride Mode - adds extra bounces - Level Lock - don't change rhythm - Sleepytime Sounds - play sounds before and after sleep and so on. The only ones I can see? Tracking, Sleep Logs (but I'd also argue that given that this is a smart device, I'd say that they could be expected baselines). But as for the other, without being argumentative, I am sincerely struggling why it seems reasonable to you that "extra bounces", etc. are a Premium "subscription" feature.
- ryandrake 2y ago
  About half of those premium features should not require a server or company-borne "costs to maintain." This seems like a pure cash grab: what subscription will the market bear?
- Flop7331 2y ago
  Very few of the premium features really require a cloud connection. The ones that do arguably aren't what the Snoo is for, e.g. diaper tracking.
- s1artibartfast 2y ago
  I think the backlash is overblown because they are only changing the status quo for new purchases with advance notice. Everybody else is grandfathered in. It is pretty hard to empathize with the people who are complaining but buying the device anyways. Nobody is holding a gun to their head and making them purchase one.
pfisch 2y ago
There is no fee to make it rock. This just isn't true.
jarrettcoggin 2y ago
My wife and I are currently borrowing a Snoo from a friend and have found it very helpful. Our daughter is 8+ weeks and regularly sleeping 7+ hours in a single stretch each night, probably heavily due to the Snoo. When we first got the Snoo, we saw an immediate change in our daughter's sleep where she went from having a unreliable 2-3 hour stretch between feedings to a solid 3+ hours between feedings with less fits during her sleep and also falling to sleep faster when we put her in the Snoo. We understand the desire for the company to make money, but we feel there's a happy middle-ground where the Snoo could have the premium app subscription waived for the first child (6-12 months premium subscription free), but require a fee for the app for future children. That being said, the Snoo has been advertised for years around the core features that are now being locked behind a subscription. We are very fortunate to be borrowing the Snoo from our friend, but it definitely makes us second guess buying a Snoo if the price goes up due to the "mandatory" subscription fee. Would we still use the Snoo even if we had to pay the subscription fee? Most likely, because one is ultimately buying sleep back by using a Snoo. At the same time, the Snoo does not work for every child and we've heard of multiple parents in our friend circles who bought the Snoo but didn't end up using it because it didn't work for their children. It's kind of an expensive, risky bet to make for the potential chance that it may not work out. I personally think the Snoo is overpriced and think the true price is probably around $1,000, but it sounds like there are inefficiencies to be ironed out on Happiest Baby's side. The "mattresses" the Snoo comes with are simple foam and it's made up of a ton of plastic. Not being a physical product engineer myself, I think it could probably be re-engineered to bring the cost down while retaining the same feature set.
__MatrixMan__ 2y ago
Let's write some open source bassinet firmware.
dmschulman 2y ago
Like every smart device, the Snoo isn't actually that smart. We have a 1 month old and bought a Snoo second-hand in anticipation and way before they changed the terms of their app. Where you'd expect the Snoo to dutifully monitor the baby and gently increase the intensity of the motion to soothe the baby, it rapidly goes from a baseline to the highest level of motion and sound within a minute or so, which is both annoying for the parents and stressful for the child. The motion locking feature was how we got around that poor excuse for engineering, but now that pretty basic feature is now behind the paywall. We just use it as a standard bassinet. I haven't signed up for the added features yet, our kid is a pretty good sleeper at this point, but those features are a necessity to operate the Snoo properly, so I'll end up paying the premium (begrudgingly). As a parent I know companies are doing everything they can to get my business, so I'm not surprised by this behavior, but it's just a disappointment and annoyance.
_heimdall 2y ago
Based on the article, it sounds like Snoo hasn't yet started charging a transfer fee when a parent goes to sell the crib after 4 or 5 months. I have to assume that fee is coming soon to a bassinet near you.
steelframe 2y ago
I'm so fed up with Internet of Shit stuff that these days if I need some random thing like a cradle rocker I'll first check to see if there's a DIY Arduino-based solution out there. In this case, sure enough, there is: https://www.instructables.com/Arduino-Cradle-Rocker/ https://www.instructables.com/Arduino-Cradle-Rocker/ https://www.instructables.com/INTELLIGENT-BABY-ROCKER/ https://www.instructables.com/INTELLIGENT-BABY-ROCKER/
- _yb2s 2y ago
  I made a DIY rocker for my son in 2 minutes at home when he was born... I took a breast milk pump that has an oscillatory vacuum, hooked it to a large syringe used for marine epoxy, and taped the syringe to one end of a removable car seat that had a curved rocking bottom. A simple rocker or swing isn't as effective as a snoo, however.
ijustwanttovote 2y ago
You can buy these off CL and sell it for almost cost. I think they were overpriced and how would you know if it works or not. We decided not to get one and our little one slept through the night. If we had the snoo, we would've thought it was the gadget.

111 points by pseudolus 2y ago

Makes sense, I’d guess most used Snoos probably get resold many times.

A tragic catch-22. You design and build the app-enabled internet rocker crib, but cannot justify supporting the app or the internet support without a subscription fee. Reminds me of the "Someone Who Is Good At The Economy Please Help Me" memes.

upon_drumhead 2y ago
No, I think this is greedier than that. > The company's founder, Harvey Karp, said the pricing change was necessary to "bring in revenue," noting that the company was not underwritten by a university or the government, and must survive on its sales alone. He said his ultimate goal would be to see the Snoo paid for by the government or by insurance companies, but it's unclear if there has been any substantive movement toward achieving that end. They want the government/insurance to buy them in bulk and then rent seek for everyone using them. There's zero reason why for the price this couldn't be done completely local and not cost Snoo a cent to run. They just don't want to because the long term strategy is to collect revenue forever.
- idatum 2y ago
  I wonder too if the data collected via that subscription is useful to monetize somehow? Maybe like health data from your watch?
  - rolph 2y ago
    a rocking basinet is a pendulum, thus mass of the child may be determined on a day to day average, thus inference may be made, such as when larger clothes are a good ad to push.
  - clintonb 2y ago
    We had a Snoo for our kid. I cannot see how anyone knowing our kid was a poor sleeper when he was born, and improved over six months, would be worth anything to anyone. “Parents are sleep-deprived” is a pretty well-known fact at this point.
    - atoav 2y ago
      "Your kid is a worse sleeper than most other kids, for only 999,99 USD you can learn more a out the possible causes"
    - s1artibartfast 2y ago
      I think that would be pretty good data for advertising to desperate parents. Hell, the fact alone that they have a $1700 bassinet probably makes them a valuable target
- nickff 2y ago
  Your quote doesn't contradict the parent comment. Snoo may need to "bring in revenue" because they're losing money. They may, simultaneously, want to have their product purchased in large quantities, as that would be another way to "bring in revenue".
- johnnyanmac 2y ago
  The government can't even subdize child care. What interest would they have in buying a bunch of high tech baby rockers?
uoaei 2y ago
Tragic? You really think the company is the poor victim?? Company made choices, they were bad choices. Bad business deserves zero sympathy.
- s1artibartfast 2y ago
  I don't have any problem empathizing with business mistakes. I have made bad choices both as an individual and as a company. Doesn't mean I am willing to subsidize them, but I get it.
  - talldayo 2y ago
    I was actually using irony to highlight how "helpless" companies act when they deliberately engineer a flaw that "forces" them to charge a recurring support fee. The scenario where they didn't consider this outcome is impossible; they knew they could charge a recurring fee by removing all physical controls. They did 90% of the work and charged you monthly for the remaining 10%, not because the last 10% is hard, but because you have no other choice. This is not a bad decision, but an intentionally insidious design pattern intended to separate owners from the functionality they paid for and own. The people that greenlit this design deserve to be held criminally liable. The business in this instance deserves no empathy.
    - s1artibartfast 2y ago
      meh, I dont have a lot of sympathy for users who buy devices with subscription functionality unless there is false advertising involved. IMO people need to grow a pair and stop buying crappy products. business policy would turn around over night if they did.
      - talldayo 2y ago
        The fact that collectively we refuse to grow a pair ensures that bad business policy dominates us until we outlaw it.

etimberg 2y ago

Similar problems exist with the Nanit baby camera. It’s free to view the camera from the app but to view it from their website costs money. That being said if you know how to run docker you can just proxy the video feed to vlc pretty easily but most parents don’t have the time for that

Laaas 2y ago
Why not just use a normal camera?
- _yb2s 2y ago
  The Dormi baby monitor app works extremely well, and you can install it on any old smartphone to repurpose as a baby monitor. For my son, I just velcroed an outdated phone with a worn out battery to the wall. It is really well designed because it also notifies if the connection is lost or if anything goes wrong, which a lot of expensive commercial cameras don't.
- jimbob45 2y ago
  It has a few bells and whistles that are worth having. We combined a Nanit camera and an Owlet sleep sock and that gave us god peace-of-mind at night. I only wish we’d topped it off with an analog walkie talkie as a backup in case the Wi-Fi went down.
  - gred 2y ago
    We used a similar setup, but opted for two sets of analog walkie talkies (instead of one set), so that we could fall back to the secondary set if the batteries ran out in the first set (we replaced the batteries in the two sets of walkie talkies at one-month offsets so that they wouldn't run out at the same time). We also had the two sets running on different channels, to avoid concurrent outages caused by unexpected radio interference. We did the math afterwards; overall availability of the child monitoring system was four nines. Satisfactory.
krisoft 2y ago
I feel differently about that. (And it is possible that it is just because I don't understand what Snoo does) To view a baby camera over the internet someone has to run a server. To run that server costs money. (If you think that the actual server/bandwidth cost is negligible, make sure to also include the cost of keeping the team employed to maintain those servers.) Someone has to pay for that. Based on what you say it sounds like the Nanit baby camera degrades gracefully to the local only features if you don't pay the subcription. That is kind of the only honest way to run a business with a connected component. As long as they were up-front about this at purchase I can't see a problem with that. How is this different from Snoo? Quite frankly I don't see how the baby rocking function requires a remote connection. It should be totally implemented locally inside the basinet and there should be no on-going cost. Therefore the only reason they might lock the feature away is due to greed.

clintonb 2y ago

The market is saturated. Four years ago we could buy a new one for $1300 or buy used on Craigslist for $800. We went with Craigslist, and resold six months later for $900 (not a typo). The bassinet is well-made so it would be silly to throw it out after 2-3 kids. The fact that the resellers are other parents makes me trust a little more that they aren’t selling a broken/dirty bassinet, so why buy new for double the cost? They are a victim of their own success.

dyauspitr 2y ago
It depends. One of my rules is to never buy a secondhand mattress and I definitely wouldn’t buy one for my baby. I’m not sure off the mattress comes with this bassinet or not.
- deleted 2y ago
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- _yb2s 2y ago
  This article mentions that the Snoo was designed to prevent SIDS, but the number one factor predicting SIDS is a used mattress... and interventional studies have proven it is not caused by other confounding factors like poor familes or second children being more likely to have used mattresses- It can be prevented with a new mattress or non-permeable mattress cover. The Snoo has an integrated mattress in a non-standard size, but you can buy new replacements from the manufacturer.
  - lolinder 2y ago
    > the number one factor predicting SIDS is a used mattress As a three-time parent who did extensive reading on SIDS prevention before the first one and brushed up before each of of the other two: What? Do you have a citation for this? Because my recollection is that all of these show up on the list of things to avoid for SIDS but a used mattress never featured once in my reading: * Smoking * Fuzzy stuff in the bed (stuffed animals, blankets) * Sleeping on stomach * Heat

taspeotis 2y ago

> The company's founder, Harvey Karp, said … the company was not underwritten by a university or the government, and must survive on its sales alone. Thanks for that primer on private enterprise…

disillusioned 2y ago
This is code for "our early investors are disappointed we didn't build in a subscription model to begin with."

uoaei 2y ago

You bought into a walled garden, now you're upset when the owner of that garden decides to do some landscaping. Something tells me people aren't really getting this whole "you need to own stuff to have control over it" thing.

ximus 2y ago
don't they own the crib after paying $1700?
- _yb2s 2y ago
  [flagged]
- userbinator 2y ago
  [flagged]
- thrtythreeforty 2y ago
  Not quite, dear customer: You own the motionless hunk of plastic, and you only rent the functionality. See also streaming hardware, BMW heated seats, textbooks, and home security systems.
  - cwillu 2y ago
    Don't forget exercise equipment; last rower a friend bought required a credit card before it would let you adjust the tension.
  - pfisch 2y ago
    You don't have to pay the subscription to make it rock. The subscription just tracks sleeping hours.
    - spencerflem 2y ago
      The headline of the article contradicts this

_yb2s 2y ago

The SNOO is cheaply made and poorly engineered despite the incredibly high price- and there isn't much to it. It should cost ~$45, not the $1695 it actually costs. I recently rebuilt a used snoo myself for my newborn nephew, and was shocked to see that it is built to move everything on rubber rollers, and those rollers use the wrong material, so they both slip and grind to dust quickly. That said- it works. I would have given my right arm for one when my son was newborn and had "colic" and would literally scream continuously from 10pm to 4am everyday for months. I was up all night holding him by myself, using the method developed by Dr. Harvey Karp (who later founded SNOO)- which is exactly what the SNOO copies and replicates automatically, which is the only thing that would calm him. It was exhausting, and I started to hallucinate frequently, and make dangerously bad decisions from lack of sleep. I think the SNOO would have saved me.

cwillu 2y ago
> built to move everything on rubber rollers, and those rollers use the wrong material, so they both slip and grind to dust quickly. Sounds like it was designed deliberately to reduce the aftermarket supply. Maybe the first person can sell it, but avoiding the creation of a robust secondary market has been the dream of a great many MBAs.
- dotBen 2y ago
  Or just wast built to the correct tolerances. We loved our Snoo but it had a life of about 4 months before our son grew out of it. It doesn't feel like those rollers need more than a year or two of life, even with multiple owners.
  - tourmalinetaco 2y ago
    That’s what they said. It’s only built to survive one, maybe two infants, but to avoid a secondary market the rockers purposefully fail. Both because it’s cheaper to buy material that won’t last, and because it makes prospective buyers more reliant on the manufacturer rather than a cheaper aftermarket supply.
- 2y ago

sklargh 2y ago

Am I the only one who thinks this is unfair? If you use the Snoo successfully it gets you two-plus hours of sleep a night. That’s magical as a parent of a newborn. We’re talking about a critical app for a hardware device that has a lifespan of several babies (ours is going on six as it circulates among friends). We should reward people who make hardware so durable and effective that they’ve sold so many of them they need to find another revenue stream. We talk a lot in this community about maintainers getting paid. Here is a company within a ferociously regulated and risky market doing that.

saagarjha 2y ago
I suspect maintainers would complain a lot less if everyone paid them $1700 first.
sowbug 2y ago
Bassinets don't need maintainers.

kylehotchkiss 2y ago

> sensors that detect when the baby is crying and simulates the sounds of the womb to help keep babies I realize this may come off as a bit insensitive but isn't this taking away a chance to bond with your child? Children not being physically held enough at young age has lifelong implications

Flop7331 2y ago
Do you feel that way about shushing?
dap 2y ago
> I realize this may come off as a bit insensitive but isn't this taking away a chance to bond with your child? Having a Snoo doesn’t mean you never hold your child. Newborns provide many such opportunities. You don’t need to take them all. See the comment above about a newborn that needed this for 6 hours a night for months. > Children not being physically held enough at young age has lifelong implications Citation needed? This is the sort of thing that people use to argue against sleep training, too, but I don’t believe much evidence has been found for that.
- grvbck 2y ago
  > Citation needed? This is the sort of thing that people use to argue against sleep training, too, but I don’t believe much evidence has been found for that. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4088358/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4088358/ https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.0504767102 https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.0504767102 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7502223/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7502223/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/9599775/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/9599775/ https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203758045 https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203758045 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8250458/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8250458/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33924970/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33924970/ https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-662-67860-2_7 https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-662-67860-2_... https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/14984130/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/14984130/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/infant-touch/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/infant-touch/

oldpersonintx 2y ago

new parents are so easy to scam, they all want the best for their new child, and they think that means blowing $$$$ on too-deluxe baby gear they will only use for a short period of time we fell for it...plonked down $$$ for the deluxe stroller...used it four times

pfisch 2y ago
That's fine, but the snoo isn't a scam. It works really well, and is far superior to any other bassinet on the market. If you value your sleep the snoo is worth it, and frankly I suspect there is a significant consumer base that would pay an even higher price for it.
tshaddox 2y ago
I’m curious why you only used the stroller 4 times. We also decided on a very expensive stroller and infant cat seat, and we’re pretty happy with them. Assuming the stroller continues to work well for 3ish years I think we’ll have no regrets. Of course, we don’t know how happy we’d have been with a cheaper option. That probably would have been fine too. But the build quality seems noticeable and it doesn’t feel like we got taken advantage of.
- oldpersonintx 2y ago
  [dead]

stavros 2y ago

> The company's founder, Harvey Karp, said the pricing change was necessary to "bring in revenue, That sounds like a "you" problem.

_8L34K 2y ago

I'm not sure I understand the $1700 price tag. Self rocking bassinets can be had for a couple hundred dollars. Many have the same functionality, with cry detection and white noise capabilities. They also don't require the use of an app, it's just a self contained unit. Where is the 500% upcharge going?

ronsor 2y ago
The cloud, of course.
pfisch 2y ago
That is not true. Show me another self rocking bassinet like the snoo. Also the snoo does not require the app at all.
- _8L34K 2y ago
  Just google "self rocking bassinet", but that is also why I asked - so if you are confident enough to say it's not true, then please explain. Does it just come down to a different controller/set of algorithms for governing the rocking/white noise capabilities? The product itself doesn't seem to cost $1700 dollars to produce - it seems to be a bassinet on rollers with a motor attached that can play sound.
- MostlyStable 2y ago
  "like the snoo" appears to be the sticking point. What specific features do you think that A) are important for helping a baby sleep and B) are only found on the snoo? I've never used the snoo or any other self-rocking bassinet (luckily my daughter is a decently good sleeper on her own), but this product [0] certainly looks like it's pretty similar for a fraction of the price, and it's even from a known brand. [0] https://www.amazon.com/Graco%C2%AE-SmartSenseTM-Soothing-Baby-Bassinet/dp/B0CXG8NVBP https://www.amazon.com/Graco%C2%AE-SmartSenseTM-Soothing-Bab...
mplewis 2y ago
Parents will pay a lot of money to get six months of sleep.

sarchertech 2y ago

I bought a Miku camera because it has a few extra features that I wanted and unlike the competition there was no monthly fee. Well then they screwed up by pushing a bad over the air update that literally bricked all operating cameras. They made that right by replacing them all, but then they went bankrupt. A new company bought their assets during bankruptcy and the first thing they did was add a monthly fee to use any of the “advanced” features (all the reasons I bought it in the first place.)

spartas 2y ago
Ditto. If you’re able to run an old version of the Android app, then you still have access to all of the Miku features. I haven’t found a similar workaround for the iOS app. https://www.reddit.com/r/daddit/comments/17iuh6r/miku_camera_functionality_restoration/ https://www.reddit.com/r/daddit/comments/17iuh6r/miku_camera...

lolinder 2y ago

I can't even imagine spending $1700 on a bassinet in the first place. As the article notes, this thing gets used for ~5 months (6 if you're really pushing it) at which point the kid is done. If you're going to have another kid then you put it into storage for a few years before it gets a second round of 5 months of use (assuming the company you bought your smart bassinet from doesn't brick it in the interim). At its simplest, it's a tiny bed on wheels and you can pick one up for free from a local parent. If you want to get really fancy you can get a self-rocking bassinet for <$400. Who are these people who are willing to spend $1700 on a bassinet but then get outraged when the clearly-exploitative company decides to exploit them for another $100?

id00 2y ago
Used it for both of my kids. Both times we bought a used one for $800 and sold for the same price after it was no longer needed.
px1999 2y ago
The aftermarket for these things means that the cost winds up being split between multiple parties in a lot of cases. Anecdotally, most parents within my circle bought their Snoo used and sold it after use. I bought an unopened snoo from facebook marketplace for $X and sold it after 6 months for $X-200. I was a little annoyed that Happiest Baby is meddling with the resale value (because I was expecting to be able to sell it on after a few months of use) IMO even though the product is overpriced, I'd have happily paid 5k for the extra sleep I believe it gave me.
- s1artibartfast 2y ago
  It would be an interesting case study on pricing and transaction costs to look at how much the resale value changes. Does it go down by the $100 people will have to pay in subscriptions? will it go down by more than that because people dont want to bother with the subscription as an extra cost?
scruple 2y ago
My wife's employer got us a rental for all of our kids. We had twins and it was amazing for them but around 3-4 months they were out of it and we returned it early. With our singleton, it didn't work at all. Kid hated it from day 1. We returned it after 3 weeks so that it wasn't eating up space in our bedroom.

rahimnathwani 2y ago

Happy Baby customers received an email in June alerting them to the change in pricing. Buyers who picked up a Snoo before July 15 were grandfathered into the previous structure, while anyone who bought after that was locked into the subscription model.

rzimmerman 2y ago

The Snoo is great and the key feature that actually helps prevent SIDS is the restraints and swaddle, which is not being moved to a subscription here. It's actually FDA approved to reduce the risk of SIDS. The "bonus" rocking and soothing noises just help parents get more sleep. The Snoo is very expensive and easy to pass down or buy used. I think they probably screwed up by selling it outright. You can rent the Snoo, which is probably a better model for everyone. This is kind of a janky way to pull back some of the rental revenue they lost by selling a durable product that people only need for a few months. It feels gross, I get it. But it's effectively a $100 per child fee which is quite reasonable given the benefits. And there's no realistic way to charge for that other than subscription for the premium (non-safety) stuff. The alternative is to keep developing new models with new features and adding crap people don't need. One thing I love about the original Snoo is that it works fine without an Internet connection or app. I used the app and it was great, but it's nice to know that when you travel or lose power, it can still rock your baby and soothe them. I hope that's still the case if there's a subscription involved.

lolinder 2y ago
> the key feature that actually helps prevent SIDS is the restraints and swaddle Just a note that the NIH guidelines specifically call out this marketing claim as BS: > Even though swaddling does not reduce the risk of SIDS, some babies are calmer and sleep better when they are swaddled. Even though swaddling does not reduce the risk of SIDS, some babies are calmer and sleep better when they are swaddled. They also call out the monitors specifically as also useless for SIDS and issue a general warning that products that claim to reduce SIDS are nearly-universally not useful and are often counterproductive. https://safetosleep.nichd.nih.gov/reduce-risk/reduce https://safetosleep.nichd.nih.gov/reduce-risk/reduce
tshaddox 2y ago
> And there's no realistic way to charge for that other than subscription for the premium (non-safety) stuff. The alternative is to keep developing new models with new features and adding crap people don't need. There’s another alternative: simply sell them for a little more than they cost. Just keep doing that. Solid business plan.

big-green-man 2y ago

[flagged]

bankcust08385 2y ago
Moral of the story: Don't give away significant % of one's salary so willingly without assurances to subsidize the adversarial gotcha capitalism game.
- big-green-man 2y ago
  What do you mean?
  - bankcust08385 2y ago
    Spend less money and acquire things of durable value.

pvillano 2y ago

Why don't they just rent the thing entirely, six months at a time? Recurring revenue, tiered pricing, no secondhand market, and less waste from planned obsolescence.

mtmail 2y ago
They offer rental, too https://www.happiestbaby.com/products/snoo-rental https://www.happiestbaby.com/products/snoo-rental
ilickpoolalgae 2y ago
We rented but we know a lot of parents that didn't because they didn't want a "used" bed for their newborn. To each their own.

egypturnash 2y ago

Meanwhile Finnish babies sleep in the cardboard box that originally contained a government-supplied cache of baby clothes, pillows, blankets, and even a toy and book or two, while their parents are both given 160 days (32 five-day work weeks) of paternal leave to care for the kid. Capitalism!

mtmail 2y ago
Photo of the baby box and contents: https://yle.fi/a/74-20083915 https://yle.fi/a/74-20083915
smabie 2y ago
Yeah and Finish devs also make a small fraction of what's possible in America
- Novosell 2y ago
  Dunking on the happiest country on earth, 7 years in a row, with "yeah well one of their professions makes less money". Nice.

ilickpoolalgae 2y ago

I took a look at the features that are locked out and they seem reasonable to be behind a subscription as they require costs to maintain. Almost all of the features that do not require some sort of cloud service connection seem to remain free. It's also free for people who use the rental option. Backlash is also understandable as they are changing the status quo. Disclosure: We rented a Snoo and it was made a huge difference between our first (no Snoo) and second child. https://www.happiestbaby.com/blogs/snoo/premium-app-features#:~:text=Premium%20Happiest%20Baby%20App%20Features&text=Level%20Lock%3A%20Keep%20SNOO's%20rhythms,a%20diaper%20change%20or%20feeding https://www.happiestbaby.com/blogs/snoo/premium-app-features....

FireBeyond 2y ago
What? Almost none of those features require costs to maintain: - Car Ride Mode - adds extra bounces - Level Lock - don't change rhythm - Sleepytime Sounds - play sounds before and after sleep and so on. The only ones I can see? Tracking, Sleep Logs (but I'd also argue that given that this is a smart device, I'd say that they could be expected baselines). But as for the other, without being argumentative, I am sincerely struggling why it seems reasonable to you that "extra bounces", etc. are a Premium "subscription" feature.
ryandrake 2y ago
About half of those premium features should not require a server or company-borne "costs to maintain." This seems like a pure cash grab: what subscription will the market bear?
Flop7331 2y ago
Very few of the premium features really require a cloud connection. The ones that do arguably aren't what the Snoo is for, e.g. diaper tracking.
s1artibartfast 2y ago
I think the backlash is overblown because they are only changing the status quo for new purchases with advance notice. Everybody else is grandfathered in. It is pretty hard to empathize with the people who are complaining but buying the device anyways. Nobody is holding a gun to their head and making them purchase one.

pfisch 2y ago

There is no fee to make it rock. This just isn't true.

jarrettcoggin 2y ago

My wife and I are currently borrowing a Snoo from a friend and have found it very helpful. Our daughter is 8+ weeks and regularly sleeping 7+ hours in a single stretch each night, probably heavily due to the Snoo. When we first got the Snoo, we saw an immediate change in our daughter's sleep where she went from having a unreliable 2-3 hour stretch between feedings to a solid 3+ hours between feedings with less fits during her sleep and also falling to sleep faster when we put her in the Snoo. We understand the desire for the company to make money, but we feel there's a happy middle-ground where the Snoo could have the premium app subscription waived for the first child (6-12 months premium subscription free), but require a fee for the app for future children. That being said, the Snoo has been advertised for years around the core features that are now being locked behind a subscription. We are very fortunate to be borrowing the Snoo from our friend, but it definitely makes us second guess buying a Snoo if the price goes up due to the "mandatory" subscription fee. Would we still use the Snoo even if we had to pay the subscription fee? Most likely, because one is ultimately buying sleep back by using a Snoo. At the same time, the Snoo does not work for every child and we've heard of multiple parents in our friend circles who bought the Snoo but didn't end up using it because it didn't work for their children. It's kind of an expensive, risky bet to make for the potential chance that it may not work out. I personally think the Snoo is overpriced and think the true price is probably around $1,000, but it sounds like there are inefficiencies to be ironed out on Happiest Baby's side. The "mattresses" the Snoo comes with are simple foam and it's made up of a ton of plastic. Not being a physical product engineer myself, I think it could probably be re-engineered to bring the cost down while retaining the same feature set.

__MatrixMan__ 2y ago

Let's write some open source bassinet firmware.

dmschulman 2y ago

Like every smart device, the Snoo isn't actually that smart. We have a 1 month old and bought a Snoo second-hand in anticipation and way before they changed the terms of their app. Where you'd expect the Snoo to dutifully monitor the baby and gently increase the intensity of the motion to soothe the baby, it rapidly goes from a baseline to the highest level of motion and sound within a minute or so, which is both annoying for the parents and stressful for the child. The motion locking feature was how we got around that poor excuse for engineering, but now that pretty basic feature is now behind the paywall. We just use it as a standard bassinet. I haven't signed up for the added features yet, our kid is a pretty good sleeper at this point, but those features are a necessity to operate the Snoo properly, so I'll end up paying the premium (begrudgingly). As a parent I know companies are doing everything they can to get my business, so I'm not surprised by this behavior, but it's just a disappointment and annoyance.

_heimdall 2y ago

Based on the article, it sounds like Snoo hasn't yet started charging a transfer fee when a parent goes to sell the crib after 4 or 5 months. I have to assume that fee is coming soon to a bassinet near you.

steelframe 2y ago

I'm so fed up with Internet of Shit stuff that these days if I need some random thing like a cradle rocker I'll first check to see if there's a DIY Arduino-based solution out there. In this case, sure enough, there is: https://www.instructables.com/Arduino-Cradle-Rocker/ https://www.instructables.com/Arduino-Cradle-Rocker/ https://www.instructables.com/INTELLIGENT-BABY-ROCKER/ https://www.instructables.com/INTELLIGENT-BABY-ROCKER/

_yb2s 2y ago
I made a DIY rocker for my son in 2 minutes at home when he was born... I took a breast milk pump that has an oscillatory vacuum, hooked it to a large syringe used for marine epoxy, and taped the syringe to one end of a removable car seat that had a curved rocking bottom. A simple rocker or swing isn't as effective as a snoo, however.

ijustwanttovote 2y ago

You can buy these off CL and sell it for almost cost. I think they were overpriced and how would you know if it works or not. We decided not to get one and our little one slept through the night. If we had the snoo, we would've thought it was the gadget.