This $1,695 smart bassinet’s best features are now behind a premium subscription

The Snoo, a very expensive but widely regarded smart bassinet, now has some of the best features of its app locked behind a new $19.99 monthly premium subscription. The change, which went into effect this week, has infuriated many Snoo owners, as the subscription puts some previously free features that new parents rely on behind a pricey paywall.

A bunch of threads in the Snoo subreddit have exploded with complaints since the plan was announced last month. “Wild choice,” wrote one user. “It’s actually disgusting to take advantage of parents who are just trying to get their kids to sleep and already paying a large sum for the pleasure of something that a) may not work, b) can only be used for a short period before becoming useless, c) requires ongoing payment to use full features.”

“I am not opposed to the concept of premium membership if they want to add more features. I am surprised to see existing features that were advertised as coming with the Snoo suddenly being paywalled,” Sarah, a Snoo owner in Australia, tells The Verge. (Sarah’s name has been changed at her request for privacy reasons.) “It’s like a mechanic intentionally breaking your car just so they can sell you the repair.”

You get the most out of your Snoo by connecting it to Wi-Fi via the app for Happiest Baby, which makes the bassinet. When you turn the Snoo on, the floor of the bassinet rocks back and forth to soothe your baby while droning white noise plays. If your baby fusses or cries, the Snoo can respond by increasing the intensity of the motion and sound, and you can control many settings from the app. The app also offers features like sleep tracking and a “weaning mode” that helps when you need to eventually transition the baby to a bigger bed.

Before now, all the features in the app has been free. But as of July 15th, the Happiest Baby app puts many features behind the Premium subscription, including some of the app’s best tools, like sleep tracking and the weaning mode.

The paywall especially stings because the Snoo isn’t cheap to buy outright. At its full retail price from Happiest Baby, the Snoo costs $1,695, while a certified preowned Snoo costs $1,195. The resale market is a common way to find one for less, but Happiest Baby is now incentivizing potential buyers to purchase a Snoo direct from Happiest Baby or an authorized partner.

If you buy a Snoo from Happiest Baby or an authorized partner after July 15th, 2024, you get a Premium subscription for one baby for nine months, Harvey Karp, CEO of Happiest Baby, tells The Verge. If you rent a Snoo — which costs $159 per month — you’ll get access to Premium features for the duration of your rental plus one extra month.

(People who bought a Snoo from Happiest Baby or an authorized partner before July 15th, 2024, get the best deal. If that’s you, you’ll get access to a Premium subscription with every baby you have. A second baby can be added via the app, and for additional babies, you can contact Happiest Baby’s customer support.)

If you buy a Snoo on the resale market, on the other hand, you’ll have to choose if you want to pay the subscription. The company gets a lot of support requests from people who have received their Snoo secondhand, according to Karp, and “the subscription allows us to provide the same level of care — from tech support, to troubleshooting, to sleep consultations — to SNOO users who have purchased their SNOO through the resale market.” 

Sarah, the Snoo owner from Australia, says she bought her Snoo from a company that buys and refurbishes Snoos but isn’t affiliated with Happiest Baby. That means she won’t get any free months of Premium, but she says she will pay for it. “I’ve already shelled out a lot of money for the device itself. It would be a shame to miss out on some of the benefits I bought it for.”

Jordan Leventhal, who is expecting a baby in September, tells The Verge that he and his wife found a Snoo on Facebook Marketplace at a price they could afford. While he says they can pay the $20 monthly fee for the Premium subscription, “I don’t know if we would have gotten the Snoo” if they knew they’d be charged.

For my wife and I, the Snoo was a lifesaver. Before we got it, our baby wouldn’t sleep on anything except for us, meaning we stayed up in shifts all night for the sake of the baby for weeks. We were desperate for anything that would let her get independent sleep.

We eventually found someone on Facebook Marketplace selling their barely used Snoo for much cheaper than Happiest Baby’s official options. (Our family very generously gifted the Snoo to us, for which we are extremely thankful, as even the lower cost still would have been a big bite.) We used the Snoo for months, and our baby just graduated to a bigger bed with a lot of help from the weaning mode — a feature we would have had to pay for if our baby had been born just a few weeks sooner.

Despite the outcry, Happiest Baby has moved forward with the subscription. “In order to continue to make Snoo even more accessible, we have to be able to be agile and adjust our business structure,” Karp says.