Superb sleep app swallowed by online shit wave

RIP sleepytime, I hardly knew thee

Good things never last — and that’s triply true online.

Let’s consider a web app I used for years called sleepytime. This helped me know when to wake up and lord, oh lord, I loved it.

The principle was elegant: you inputted when you wanted to get out of bed and it’d tell you when to go to sleep. It did this by chaining together the length of a sleep cycle (around 90 minutes) and how long people generally take to fall asleep, the goal being for your alarm to go off when you’re in the lightest sleep.

And you know what? It worked.

As someone who often wakes up feeling like they’ve been assaulted into consciousness, sleepytime was a blessing; it was a salve, a slice of control over the start of my day.

An accurate depiction of me most mornings.

One of the reasons I loved sleepytime was its simplicity. There were no bells and whistles, just a simple screen that pumped pure information into my poorly-rested veins.

Then, as is always the way with the internet, cash got in the way.

This is what the OG web app looked like.

Sleepytime was hoovered up into the online machine and altered, appallingly.

The seamless functionality? Gone. The streamlined design? Farewell, friend.

Instead, the website was effectively replaced with a full-scale advert for a mattress company. Yes, the tool survives, but it’s coated in a crappy veneer.

This is not the sort of stripped back experience I want when trying to create a good bedtime routine.

What happened to sleepytime was a small-scale version of enshittification, a term coined by Cory Doctorow.

Effectively, enshittification is when a platform shifts from serving the needs of its users to trying to make money from them. As this progresses, the people-centric design is chopped away and replaced with advertiser-friendly elements instead.

In the case of sleepytime, the stripped-back aesthetic was replaced with a company trying to sell you shit.

It was enshittified.

Hungry to know more, I did some online sleuthing. It turns out the original creator of the site sold it back in 2019.

But you know what? I can’t be mad at the web app. It’s tough out there.

The internet’s a mess. It’s borderline impossible to make a living from web apps — especially one that has no adverts.

People have to eat, so if you have a chance to make a bit of cash for something you’ve poured hours into, why not?

Yes, this led to the demise of sleepytime, but all is not lost. The internet taketh away, yet it also giveth. Hard.

Since the original sleep cycle timer went down, a range of others popped up in its place.

Two of the best I’ve found are I’m Sleepy and a sleepytime clone called, uh, sleepytime. Both are excellent, both are simple, and both are ad-free.

For now.

These days, there are two certainties: death, and something good on the internet getting shitty.