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Comment by arunabha | Hacker News Reader

Getting better sleep has been a bit of a personal quest for me. Having said that, much as I would love to get the device, having been bitten by a bunch of subscription locked devices by startups, I have (reluctantly) settled on a policy of not purchasing hardware that can't work independently of the company.

Startups are hard at the best of times, hardware startups are harder. When the company making the hardware inevitably goes under, you are left with a useless piece of plastic that you paid a ton of money upfront for, and then paid a hefty sum every month on top.

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Thanks for this thoughtful response.

The reason we use a subscription is to keep the upfront cost much lower. It's important to us that we make better sleep as accessible as possible. A one-time payment makes that more challenging at this stage.

We also wanted to keep things simple at checkout. Too many options can be confusing, and at this early stage our priority is making it straightforward for people who want to try the technology.

It's a delicate balance.

Having to select 2 items for 1 sleep intervention is a weird way of keeping things simple..

To help you a bit: 1 is easier… So 1 hardware product working independently is what we want. If you must to appease the shareholders do a subscription…make it add some functionality that would be impossible without a subscription… But locking people in a subscription to “keep upfront cost lower” is devious at best. Add to the world..don’t (cash)grab.

It's understandable why you would need to do that. I'm not against subscriptions in cases like this.

From my side as a customer, here's what I would need to see before supporting you:

1. A one off payment to own the current version of the device. This must include the ability to download all of my data that I generate from using the device. It can be in raw, unporcessed form.

2. A subscription is acceptable but would pay for cloud based data processing, generating reports etc. Processing and storing my data, in other words

3. A clear privacy policy stating that you will never sell my data in either raw or processed form. But I assume as a medical device that's already in place?

Thanks for the comment.

We'll be clearer on the privacy policy. We're not yet regulated as a medical device.

The data download has been discussed, it's not currently in the product.

We actually take a different approach on the subscription. The processing of your sleep data itself is included with the device. It's the stimulation, which we believe is where the value is, which the subscription covers.

Of course there is extra processing with the stimulation as well.

We're not there yet on downloading of data. It's been discussed, and we currently provide raw data to researchers. So few people would know what to do with raw EEG data. We've seen other companies provide EEG downloads in the past, only to remove the feature, and we'd like to have a better understanding of why.

I know from my previous start-up, supporting data download added support overhead, and that was just location data.

I have a hard time believing it's about the complexity of having a toggle button to switch to "one time purchase" during checkout. The ability to make such a selection is the option which enables the product to be accessible to more users, not the other way around.

> The reason we use a subscription is to keep the upfront cost much lower. It's important to us that we make better sleep as accessible as possible. A one-time payment makes that more challenging at this stage.

Ugh. Just say "recurring revenue". We're not naive.

Thanks for your thoughtful comment.

We've taken it to heart and have decided to run a test with a one-time payment, currently only really available to HN.

The context is at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45338308

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