A sleep sound app with no subscription
A rain sound does not get better with a monthly update. Charging a subscription for access to one amounts to renting a switch.
The three-year arithmetic
The big sleep apps sit between $50 and $70 a year. Over three years of daily use — which is ordinary for an evening ritual — that comes to $150 to $210. To listen to rain.
Observed public annual pricing of the main sleep apps, promotions excluded. The Sleep.fm line shows your own country's price.
What a subscription changes about the product
Recurring revenue has to be justified every month. So the app has to produce new content continuously: meditations, narrated stories, programmes, sleep statistics, notifications reminding you of your subscription. Every addition takes up screen space, and the screen becomes a platform where you were looking for a button.
A one-time purchase has nothing to prove each month. It allows an app that stays small: twenty sounds, a mixer, a timer. Nothing to scroll, nothing to discover, nothing that moves between two versions — which matters when you use the app with your eyes half shut, every evening, in the dark.
No feature disappears
What you bought stays active, even if you do not open the app for six months. No sounds that re-lock, no mixes lost because a payment failed.
Nothing to send to a server
With no account to maintain there is nothing to synchronise: the sounds are on the phone and your mixes do not leave it. The app works in flight mode, and no sleep data is collected.
No chasing
No notification offering a discount on the annual plan, no window on launch. Access to the full version is a line in the settings and a sheet that appears if you touch a locked sound.
What Sleep.fm costs
- 4 sounds — one per family
- 1 saved mix
- Timer and fade out
- Night mode
- All 20 sounds
- Unlimited saved mixes
- Lock screen widget
- Equaliser and reverb
Try it with the four free sounds
No account, no email, no trial period that turns into a charge. iPhone and Android.
See the app