How it works

The idea

Lying awake, the problem is usually that your mind will not stop finding things interesting. A podcast makes it worse — you want to know how it ends. Music has structure your brain follows. Meditation apps ask you to concentrate on something, which is a task.

Boredom does the opposite. There is nothing to follow, nothing to anticipate, and nothing to resolve, so attention has nowhere to go and quietly gives up. That is the whole product: a library of recordings that are genuinely, thoroughly not worth listening to.

The one-hour rule

Press play and you get 60 minutes of uninterrupted listening. As the hour ends the audio fades out over about 60 seconds and stops. It stays stopped until somebody presses play again.

This is deliberate, and it is the thing people ask about most. Nobody asleep presses play, so the audio is not still going at 4 a.m., it does not follow you into your alarm, and it is not quietly streaming into an empty room all night. If you are awake when the hour ends, press it again and you get another one. There is no limit on how many times.

The clock is kept on our side, not in your phone, so reloading the page or opening a second tab does not extend it.

Finding something

The library is sorted by subject — appliance manuals, council minutes, insurance policies, stitch counts, rainfall figures — and you can also filter by how long a recording runs, what kind of voice is reading it, and how fast. Everything is searchable, including transcripts where contributors have provided them.

The default ordering is by sleep score: the share of listeners who told us they fell asleep to it. That is the only rating we collect. There are no stars, no reviews, and no comments, because none of those measure the only thing that matters here.

The player

One very large button, the time, and nothing else. There is no scrubbing bar, because feeling around for one in the dark is exactly the sort of thing that wakes you up properly. It keeps playing with the screen off, works from the lock screen and from headphone controls, and when one recording ends it rolls on to another — still inside the same hour.

What it costs

$10.00 a month, and you can cancel from your own account page at any time — it goes straight to the payment company's own billing screen, and there is nobody to argue with. If you cancel, you keep listening until the month you have paid for runs out.

There are no adverts. An advert is interesting, and interesting is the enemy.

Where the recordings come from

People record them. Anyone can become a contributor, upload something dull, and earn a share of what subscribers pay — worked out from how long people actually spent listening to their recordings. Every upload is listened to by a person before it goes into the library. How contributing works.

One honest caveat

This is not a medical device and it does not treat anything. If you have not slept properly for weeks, see a doctor. Then come back, because the freezer manual will still be here.