What sleep story apps actually cost

The prices, side by side

Every figure below was read from the app's own App Store listing, US storefront, on 12 October. Apple sets prices country by country and they change without notice, so the listing is always the figure that counts.

• Lullable — $2.99 a month or $19.99 a year, shown as Lullable Premium Monthly and Annual in the listing's In-App Purchases panel. Free to download, and one full story, Aristotle, the Greatest Philosopher, plays end to end without paying. Sleep stories and nothing else.
• Headspace — $12.99 a month or $69.99 a year. The listing states that these are United States prices and points new users towards a free trial. Meditation and sleep content, plus coaching and therapy, whose pricing the listing says varies by subscription.
• Calm — free to download, and the listing says there are never any ads and that some programs and features stay free permanently. The description does not print the subscription prices. The In-App Purchases panel lists several Calm Premium items starting at $14.99, with $69.99 among them, but does not say which is monthly and which annual, so we do not either.

Read flatly, Lullable's year costs less than a third of Headspace's, and its month a little under a quarter. That is a fact about the price, not a verdict on the apps.

Why there are two bands

The gap is not a markup. Calm and Headspace are selling a different shape of thing. Meditation courses, breathwork, music, daily practices and, in Headspace's case, coaching and therapy all sit under one subscription, and the sleep stories are one shelf among several. A platform is priced as a platform, and for someone who uses most of it the annual plan is reasonable value.

The mismatch only appears when the sleep shelf is the only one you open. Then you are paying for a building to use one room, which is the case we made at more length about Calm. Affordable sleep stories, in the narrow sense, are what you get when the product is that one room and nothing else.

What the free tiers actually include

This is where the comparisons online tend to blur, so, precisely. Calm's free tier is the most generous of the three in kind: a permanent set of programs and features, without advertising, according to its own listing. Headspace's listing describes a free trial, and does not describe a permanent free tier. Lullable's free tier is one story, complete, and it does not expire.

Free sleep stories for adults also exist well outside the app stores, and they deserve saying out loud. Long, uneventful podcasts. Public-domain audiobooks. Radio that was doing this job long before any app. The list of things worth playing at night is longer than any catalogue. The one cost hidden in free audio is advertising, and a mid-roll at 3am is a structural problem, not an annoyance; download it in advance and check that it carries none.

When cheapest is the wrong question

The concessions, said plainly. Lullable's catalogue is a fraction of the size of either platform's. There is no meditation in it, no breathwork, no celebrity narrator and no course. If you meditate in the morning and listen at night, one platform subscription covering both is the sensible purchase, and switching to something narrower to save money would be a false economy.

The cheapest sleep app is only the right choice when the narrow thing is the thing you use. If what you want at night is a long, flat voice that gives its ending away early and then gets quieter, you do not need to pay platform prices for it, and you do not need to pay anything at all to find out whether it suits you.