The Smart Bed That Keeps Parents from Sleeping

“If you can do this, it’s the best money you’ll ever spend,” one new father told me. Another mother told me that after buying the SNOO, she slept “at least an hour more a night, sometimes two” with her second child than she did with her first.

The impending lack of sleep was one of the most terrifying thoughts during pregnancy. If SNOO really is the tool I need to get an extra hour of sleep each night, I’m willing to do almost anything. And how much does a crib cost anyway?

Well, the SNOO will cost just under $1,700—about as much as an entire team of home workers would spend for a month. But the SNOO cult believes it’s worth it. New York magazine writes, “If you can find the money in your budget—or, better yet, add it to your baby’s gift list as a potential group gift from loved ones—you’ll be very, very grateful for all those extra moments of peace.”

The SNOO is every Instagram mom’s dream. The smart crib is equipped with sensors that detect baby’s cries and automatically turns on white noise and soothing motion. It prides itself on how womb-like it is, not to mention its clean lines, walnut finishes, and mid-century modern aesthetic. It’ll draw you in—just a week after I first heard the word SNOO, it was all I could think about. Advertisements started popping up on my phone, and I decided that when I was three months pregnant, I had to drive 50 miles to buy a used SNOO from Facebook Marketplace for $600.

After picking up the SNOO in a Trader Joe’s parking lot an hour and a half from home, I was verbally introduced to the SNOO world by the saleswoman, a seasoned mother with two kids in the back of her truck and one on her chest. “You’re lucky you have this now,” she said. “The company is just going to start charging a monthly fee.” The mother at Trader Joe’s arranged for me to download the app as soon as I got home and set up the SNOO early (seven months in advance) to become a seasoned user before the additional fees kicked in.

But wait. A monthly fee, on top of the nearly $2,000 for the crib? My husband immediately panicked that the SNOO, with its internal listening device, would be listening to us for that long: “I checked online, and the monthly fee is only $20. I’ll pay that so I won’t be spied on.”

“It’s not about the $20,” I decided. “It’s about the principle!”

You wouldn’t believe the nuclear fury this has unleashed on the parenting internet, where, to be fair, absolutely everything about parenting decisions, the science of raising children, and baby products is debated with a white-hot fury that even politics and religion can’t match. Moms and dads across the country are furious with Happiest Baby, the company that makes the SNOO, after it announced it would be creating a paywall for features that were previously available to anyone who owned the device.

The company claims it gave away these “premium” features for free to customers who should be grateful, and after nine months, everyone will have to pay, in a transparent attempt to squeeze some of the aftermarket revenue. On Reddit’s r/Snoolife, commenters aren’t buying it. They’re like, “I actually bought from them within 9 months and they still closed my app and won’t respond to my customer service messages. I’m so mad.”

Or this: “They didn’t know how to make more money, so they pretended their app was always premium. Now they want to charge for the hardware we have. People, if you’re reading this: GET THE FUCK OUT.”

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Sure, in the grand scheme of things, that’s not much. As useful as SNOOs are, they’re only useful until your baby outgrows them after four to six months, so we’re talking about an extra $100 or more. But the rule in question is one that really annoys people, myself included. It’s not just the extra fees, like when you buy a plane ticket that “costs” $300 only to find out you have to pay more for carry-ons, check-in, assigned seating, etc.

The whole point possession something about being able to use it and all its features. The “right to repair” movement for cars, farm equipment, and tech gadgets has been pushing for a law that people who own machines shouldn’t have to pay to update them under a license. Maybe the crazy moms of the internet need their own movement: a “right to rock” or “diapers with dignity.” Or companies could just have the good sense to treat selling their second-hand products the way authors treat selling used books: as a flattering sign that they’ve created something that people value, which, financially speaking, is now none of their business.

Kara Kennedy is a freelance writer based in Washington, D.C.