Happiest Baby

Snoo Smart Sleeper Bassinet

If there was ever a house fire, the snoo is the first item I would grab (after family members, obvi). My baby has been sleeping in 10-12 hours stretches since she was 9 weeks old. We bought it used, we are the 3rd owners and it still works great. I'm saving it so everyone I love can borrow it!

The snoo itself is pretty good, but it's features are all controlled through the app other than the start stop button. Happiest Baby just paywalled most of the features, including safety features, for a subscription of $20 per month. The app itself has gotten worse over time. Avoid the Snoo because you can't trust the company that makes it.

It it definitely helped him fall asleep when he was being fussy. BUT he would spit up much more in the snow versus a regular bassinet.

This bassinet is amazing ! Our baby loved it :) If your not sure and don’t want to spend that much money buying it they do have a rent option.

While I originally was a fan of the SNOO, the company is now charging an additional $20/month for the app if you want to be able to use the SNOO to its full capacity. Some of the features in the paid subscription are what I (and clearly many others) believe should be a standard feature. This company already increased the cost of the SNOO by $495 since I purchased and seems to just be price gouging consumers left and right. Buyer beware.

Lots of others have covered the sleeping and safety benefits and drawbacks of the Snoo. So I’ll take a moment to talk about the reliability and build quality of this product.

We are on to our 6th Snoo for our two kids. (All rentals.)

1.) The speaker started making horrible loud crackling sounds instead of playing white noise. You can’t disable the white noise, so our only solution was to cover the speaker opening in duct tape while we waited for our replacement. I can tell that they’re using a fairly budget amplifier. Even when working correctly it buzzes with a lot of 60Hz noise from the wall power. Not surprising they just completely fail. Please let us disable the white noise if you’re going to continue using cut rate components like this.

2.) The second Snoo worked fine for the remaining 4 months that our first kid needed it for. They even sent us a free large Snoo sack with the replacement, which was nice I guess.

3.) The third Snoo was two years later, for our second. Within the first several weeks, the speaker started failing in a different way. It cut out when the platform swung to the right. My guess is the wiring was coming loose or rubbing against something. Again with the duct tape and replacement. Please let us disable white noise!

4.) The fourth and fifth Snoo showed up at the same time, with a single shipping label that said there was only supposed to be one box. But there were definitely two boxes. They told me to send one back. Packing and shipping Snoos is a huge pain. They’re heavy and cumbersome and don’t fit in a lot of cars easily. I live in Seattle and didn’t really want to leave it outside in the rain and at the mercy of porch pirates for a Fedex pickup.

5.) The fifth Snoo worked for a few months until it started pickup ghost noises and leveling up when it was completely silent in the room. This happened every 10-20 minutes, all night long, waking up us and the baby. This means that we have to lock the Snoo at baseline and not use the automatic soothing. Which means if we do want to sooth, we have to be awake and do so manually from the app.

6.) The sixth Snoo is on its way. Crossing our fingers.

My biggest takeaway is that I would never, ever buy a Snoo outright. They are poorly made and only come with a one-year warranty. If you’re going to rent, consider that you probably need a backup plan for if your Snoo inevitably craps out on you. It’s up to you if the sleep benefits are worth the hassle. Fortunately you can try it for a month and see.

We rented because we didn’t know if our baby would take to the Snoo. He did, and we loved it. Turns out he is a good sleeper anywhere, but I think WE slept better with him in the Snoo, knowing he was secure/strapped down. The sleep data was also super helpful for tracking trends. I would say this was worth the price of the rental, even though it’s expensive. I wouldn’t buy it outright unless I planned to use it for more than one kid.

I found the app easy to use, even though it did sign me out one night while my baby was in the Snoo. Easy enough to sign back in, etc. The Snoo is also just a really beautiful, modern bassinet. I didn’t think of it as an eyesore in my bedroom at all!

We didn’t have a hard time transferring him to a crib after the Snoo, either, but we also made sure to put him down for naps in other places (pack and play, other bassinet, and crib).

I wanted to hate the Snoo because it’s so expensive, but we really loved it. Especially for baby’s first month at home, it really helped us sleep knowing he was ok and being able to see when he needed to be soothed. I recommend it, but I think the rental option is the right choice for some users vs buying outright.

Giving this product 1 heart! My recommendation is to try a regular bassinet to then determine if your baby may have a chance of better sleep with the snoo. My baby slept just fine without it.
The reason for my 1 heart is because of their rental process which is highway robbery!! They market it at $159 a month. The real price is double that and more. They charge you a return fee of $59, their expectation return date is less than the actual month you paid for or they will automatically charge your card again. They ask for $100 deposit in addition to all their fees and they do not disclose that when you initiate the return you still have to wait for Fedex to process this before they can see that you actually returned making it extremely difficult to return on time so that you get charged anyway. I do not recommend you go the rental route. This was a nice gift that was on my registry that turned into an expensive for me. Again, Highway robbery!! I will be contacting my bank and disputing this as I did not even use their product for more than a day and they did not disclose all these details. This was supposed to be FREE for me and I have had to come out of pocket over $400. They seriously need to consider disclosing all details before moms put this their registry. We already have to deal with the stress of a newborn and deprived sleep so they can add this to our long to do list of nonsense!! Horrible experience is the least to say!!!

The Snoo is a great tool to help the baby sleep. I don't necessarily think it gets us much more sleep but our son loves movement so it comforts him while resting. I fear he will have a hard time sleeping once he outgrows the Snoo. My biggest complaint is we bought the Snoo for almost 1700$ and are traveling to family for a month and were looking to rent a Snoo. They do not offer any time of promotion or discount on rentals for customers who already have paid for a Snoo. This is a bit discouraging and poor service in my opinion considering we made this significant investment that only last 6 months. Their suggestion was to fly with our Snoo which made me lol and was an extremely poor solution. I hope in the future their customer service improves. Lastly, if traveling for 5 weeks you can only rent the Snoo by the month. Another example of poor customer service.

Just buy it (or rent if you have any doubts). The difference between the four nights we were in the hospital with her in a standard bassinet vs the first week at home with her in the Snoo were life changing. Within a month we had a baby who happily slept 6 hours. My mother was amazed by how well it works. Now we have a 3 1/2 month old who stays down 8 hours at night at least three times a week, and goes back to sleep quickly when she does need something overnight. Highlight of my morning is unswaddling her and watching her little arms pop up to stretch.

Also worth mentioning: it is a 100% safe spot to put her when she won't be soothed by us. More than once I had a frustrating moment, bundled her up and put her in the snoo, and we both had a few minutes to calm down. Even if it doesn't put her to sleep, it does a wonderful job of calming her down enough to actually assess what she needs.

Assembles quickly, and comes with a flat sheet and three sizes of sleep sack. (buy extras of everything - you won't want to only have wet/dirty sheets in the middle of the night, but you will have something to use right of the box.) App can be a little spotty but works well overall.

My biggest source of anxiety when I got pregnant was worrying over lack/loss of sleep once baby was here. I won't say we are never tired, but I can genuinely say that we've never been so tired that we didn't feel like ourselves. I can smile at my smug family members asking how much sleep I've been getting and say 'Plenty! How about you?'