Hatch Restore 3: A gorgeous design ruined by a greedy company.
I own two Hatch Restore 3s, which I bought on a Black Friday sale for £150 each. One for me, and one for my sister. I’m not saying that to flex, but to make it very clear that I have donated £300 to a company that has since revealed itself to be one of the most cynical subscription traps I have ever encountered.
I am writing this review as my penance for not doing my research before buying it, and I would like this to be your warning before you fall for the marketing too.
Don’t be sucked in by the TikTok influencers unboxing these with their perfectly arranged nightstands. Don’t be fooled by the sleek and minimalist design that looks gorgeous on a bedside table, and the well-designed physical controls that make the thing feel premium. It is all a carefully constructed facade for the Hatch+ subscription plan. Underneath the aesthetic and stylish body is a product that has been deliberately and systematically hollowed out to make it nearly unusable without the £5 monthly subscription. £5 may not seem like much, but when you’ve spent £150+ on a product, you expect some value for money.
I am going to give you the real flavour of what you’ll be subjected to when you buy from this greedy company.
Without Hatch+, you cannot play the vast majority of the wind-down routines available in the evening. You cannot play any sleep sounds at all. You cannot play your own music or podcasts on the speaker to fall asleep to. The handful of free routines that do exist are locked at whatever volume, brightness and colour Hatch has decided for you. So your expensive, beautiful, minimalist sleep device will blast you with a weird orange or green glow at full brightness when you are trying to rest, because Hatch would like £5 a month before you’re allowed to customise it.
You can technically change the brightness and colour manually through the app, except you’ll have to go through this process every night as there is no way to save it to the schedule. Moreover, the entire point of a dedicated sleep device is to remove your phone from the bedroom. To do the one thing the app lets you do for free, you need your phone. In your bedroom. Beside you. The phone is the very thing this alarm clock is supposed to eliminate.
This is my main kicker which nearly made me laugh out loud when I found out: you cannot re-enable a disabled alarm. The moment you turn one off in the app, it vanishes behind the paywall. To set a new alarm time, you have to create a brand new alarm from scratch, every single time. This is a product that is, at its most basic, an alarm clock. You cannot re-enable your own alarms on your own alarm clock.
This is not an oversight or a bug; this is a choice that someone at Hatch made in a meeting, and everyone just nodded along.
What you actually get for £150 is a sunrise alarm clock with a nice enclosure. You can find those on Amazon for £25 to £30. The rest of the hardware exists purely to justify the subscription that Hatch forces you to buy.
Customer support, to their credit, did respond promptly when I complained initially. They gave me three months of Hatch+ for free. While this was a nice gesture, it solved absolutely none of my underlying complaints. After those three months, I was back to the choice of paying up, or going back to a £150 ornament.
To top it all off, the app is unbelievably slow and clunky. Whenever you press anything, it can take anywhere up to 5 minutes to load, or it comes up with an error and you have to try again. For a product with this price tag and this level of subscription dependency, the interface behaves like it’s a drunk sloth.
And then to really rub salt into the wound: some of the audio content locked behind Hatch+ is available entirely free on Spotify. My example of this is the podcast ‘Notes from England’, which I can listen to at no cost whatsoever.
To make this podcast situation even more farcical, the content on the Restore 3 does not seem to automatically move on to the next episode. Every single night, it plays the same track on repeat. So not only are you paying £5 a month for content freely available on Spotify, you are paying to hear the same episode of it over and over again.
The core promise of this product is a phone-free bedroom. Hatch has made that functionally impossible, charged you £150 for the privilege, and is now asking £5 a month for content you already have access to on your phone, which you still need to keep in the room anyway.
Please take my advice: buy a cheaper sunrise alarm clock. Keep the £120 difference. Then you can sleep well, free of charge.
26 de setembro de 2025
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