When I first announced I was pregnant , the first thing other parents told me to do was buy a fancy bassinet called a SNOO. The SNOO’s magic is that it detects the baby’s sounds electronically and rocks itself as needed so you don’t have to.
“If you can swing it, it’s the best money you’ll spend,” one new father told me. Another mother told me that after purchasing the SNOO with her second child, she slept “at least one hour more a night, sometimes two” than with her first.
The looming sleep deprivation has been one of the scariest thoughts during pregnancy. If the SNOO really is the tool I need to get an hour more of shut-eye per night, I’m willing to do almost anything. Plus, how much can a bassinet really be?
Well, the SNOO will set you back just under $1,700 — or about the same amount that used to get you a whole team of household staff for a month. But the SNOO cult is convinced it’s worth it. New York magazine writes : “If you can find room in the budget — or better yet, add it to your baby registry as a potential group gift from your loved ones — you will be very, very grateful for all those bonus moments of peace.”
The SNOO is the Instagram mother’s dream. The smart bassinet is equipped with sensors that detect when the baby is crying and will automatically turn on white noise and soothing motion. It prides itself on how “womb-like” it is, not to mention the clean lines, walnut trim, and midcentury modern aesthetic. It’ll suck you in — just one week after first hearing the word SNOO, it was all I could think about. Ads started popping up on my phone, and I decided that at three months pregnant, I had to drive 50 miles to acquire a secondhand SNOO from Facebook Marketplace for $600.
Upon picking up the SNOO in a Trader Joe’s parking lot an hour and a bit from home, I was verbally prepared to enter the SNOO world by the seller, a veteran mother with two children in the back of her truck and one on her breast. “You’re lucky you got it now,” she said. “The company is about to start charging a monthly fee.” The mother at Trader Joe’s organized a plan for me to download the app as soon as I got home and set up the SNOO early (seven months early) to get grandfathered in as a user before the extra charges kicked in.
But wait. A monthly fee, on top of almost $2,000 for the crib? My husband immediately freaked out about the fact that the SNOO, with its internal listening device, would be eavesdropping on us for that amount of time: “I’ve looked online, and the monthly fee is only $20. I’ll pay that not to get spied on.”
“It’s not about the $20,” I decided. “It’s the principle!”
You wouldn’t believe the nuclear fury this has unleashed on the parenting internet, where, to be fair, absolutely everything relating to parenting decisions, the science of childrearing, and baby products is discussed with a white-hot rage that not even politics or religion can approach. Mothers and fathers all over the country are livid at Happiest Baby, the company that makes the SNOO, after it announced that it would be creating a paywall for features previously available to anyone with the hardware.
The company says it has been giving away these “premium” features for free to customers who should be grateful, and after nine months, everyone will now have to pay, in what is a transparent attempt to squeeze some revenue out of the secondhand market. On the Reddit page r/Snoolife, commenters aren’t buying it. They either sound like this: “I actually did buy from them within 9 months and they still shut down my app and aren’t responding to my customer service messages. I’m so angry.”
Or like this: “They don't know how to make more money, so they chose to pretend their app was always premium. Now they want to charge for hardware we own. Snoo folks, if you're reading this: GET F***ED.”
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Of course, in the grand scheme of the costs of baby care, it’s not a lot. However useful SNOOs are, they are only useful until babies outgrow them after four to six months, so we are talking about an additional $100 or so here. But the principle in question is one that does get people, including me, really upset. It’s not just add-on fees, like when you buy a plane ticket that “costs” $300, only to find out that you have to pay more for a carry-on bag, check in, assigned seating, et cetera.
The whole point of owning something is that you get to use it and all its features. The “right to repair” movement for cars and farm equipment and tech gadgetry has been pushing to make it the law that people who own machines shouldn’t be required by licensing to pay to keep them updated. Perhaps the mad mothers of the internet need their own movement: the “right to rock” or “diapers with dignity.” Or companies could just have the good sense to treat secondhand sales of their products the way authors treat sales of used books: as a flattering sign they’ve made something people value that, financially speaking, is now none of their business.
Kara Kennedy is a freelance writer living in Washington, D.C.
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