When you have a baby, sleep becomes the holy grail. You become convinced that getting your baby to go the hell to sleep depends on the right swaddles, the right pacifier, the right settings on the white noise machine, the right order of events. If a routine gets disrupted or a special object misplaced, you fear that the kid will be awake for days, and thus, so will you.
In July, many parents had their routines shattered by such a disruption involving the Snoo, a $1,700 “smart” bassinet. Happiest Baby, the Snoo’s parent company, threw up a paywall between numerous users and the bassinet’s “premium” features.
Developed by celebrity pediatrician Harvey Karp, author of the best-selling 2002 book “The Happiest Baby on the Block,” the Snoo is available in more than 20 countries. It gently rocks your baby, who is safely strapped on their back, gently all night long as white noise plays. If the baby cries, it ratchets up the rocking and turns up the noise. If the baby doesn’t calm down after 10 minutes, and you’ve somehow remained in your bed amid the drama, the Snoo app sends your phone a notification, telling you to get up and intervene. You can use it until the baby is 6 months old. At that point, you can put the Snoo on a “weaning” mode that keeps them still until they start to cry.
But now, anyone who’s gotten their Snoo second-hand — and there is a healthy resale market for them — will need to pay $20 per month to use “premium” features such as weaning mode, a sleep log, and locking it so it doesn’t escalate beyond a certain level. (Level 5 of the Snoo is a lot.) The shift caused an uproar among Snoo users. Alongside owners of hand-me-down Snoos, parents who bought a Snoo for their first baby and then re-deployed it when a second child came along also reported that they were asked to pay the fee. The extra $20 a month might not break the bank for someone who can afford even a used Snoo, but the principle of it is galling.
“What a shady practice … is there any company not focused on endless growth and continued astronomical gouging of its clients?” asked one parent on Reddit. “Happiest baby, angriest parents. I hope they get sued to oblivion,” wrote another. The New York Times reported that some U.S. users have filed complaints against the company with the Federal Trade Commission.
Why, one might ask, should anyone need this stupidly expensive data-hoovering technology to help do something that parents have done since time immemorial?
When I first learned of the Snoo, I assumed it was a techno-utopian gadget for wealthy people who think that baby-shushing is somehow beneath them. Then, in February 2020, I had a baby. As the pandemic exploded and my husband prepared to go back to work — which meant heading into an ICU overflowing with Covid patients — stress and sleep deprivation briskly ushered me to what I can only assume was the brink of insanity. No friend or family member was going to come help us. But a robot baby bed cannot get Covid. So we rented a Snoo. The world continued to fall apart, but the baby went the hell to sleep.
I used the Snoo when I had my second baby, too. This was before the app began offering parents the ability to log a baby’s diapers, bottles, breastfeeding times, and more. Some see this as a convenience, but take a look at Happiest Baby’s privacy policy, and you may not feel so happy. Through the app, the company collects reams of data about babies’ sleep patterns, diets, and “outputs,” and monetizes that data by allowing third-party advertising networks to target ads at you across the web. You can use the Snoo without connecting to Wi-Fi, but then you can’t, say, adjust the level from your smartphone.
The Snoo touches two of the most precious things in your life — your baby, and your ability to get sleep — but in the end, it is a tech product, and a high-end one at that.
So I bristled when I read the New York Times’ story about the app debacle, which described Karp as a pediatrician who developed the Snoo due to his frustration with sudden unexplained infant death rates in the U.S.
Alongside its many bells and whistles, the Snoo includes a straight jacket-like device that keeps the baby on their back, a design informed by research showing that babies are less likely to die when sleeping on their backs. But the cost of the Snoo is obviously prohibitive for most people.
Research has also shown that those who can afford a $1,700 crib are statistically the least likely to need the safety features. Sudden unexplained infant death is strongly tied to low socioeconomic class. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, it is most prevalent in Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, and West Virginia — five of the six poorest states in the country.
So who is Karp really serving here? Between the Snoo itself, the new “premium” app fees, his best-selling books, and the endless streams of data that Happiest Baby is raking in, this baby doctor sure has done well for himself. In 2020, back when the Snoo cost only a cool $1,300, Forbes reported that Happiest Baby was worth $50 million. The company also has backing from an impressively long list of venture capital firms.
Karp says he wants the Snoo, which is approved by the Food and Drug Administration and used in some hospitals, to become a state-mandated offering of health insurance providers, like the breast pump. But it’s hard to see how a product so cringe-worthily high-end will convince an already unsympathetic system that this is something that every parent needs. And the road to that sort of universal access is long. The first known breast pumps in the U.S. were built in the mid-19th century. But insurance coverage only became mandated in 2012.
With the new “premium” paywall, Happiest Baby feels even more like a software firm or a ride-hailing service than a company on a mission to keep babies safe. I believe that the Snoo kept me from losing my mind, and I think everyone taking care of a newborn deserves the kind of sleep a Snoo can provide. But for the foreseeable future, Snoos will probably remain a boutique product that serves the wealthiest babies — not the ones who need it most.
Ellery Roberts Biddle is a journalist and former fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society. She is currently co-authoring a book on the importance of independent audits for artificial intelligence.