hatch.co Reviews 9

Went from a great product to having all the features put behind a paywall. No phone support if something is wrong. Instead, their text bot will send you an email stating to expect at 1-2 day turnaround. Do not buy.

Expensive product paired with an expensive subscription fee selling you features that the artificially make unavailable to you. This company could not get any greedier.

Do yourself a favor and buy a $5 smartbulb and a $20 bluetooth speaker. No clunky UI, no extra stupid subscription fee, at a quarter of the price.

The app doesn’t align with the new Nest Rest. The stupid device disconnects from the app anytime you unplug it and the only way to connect it is to spend 30 min fighting with it, sitting next to your router while you reset it. Customer Service doesn’t exist. I emailed 8 days ago and left a review on Amazon. No one has contacted me.

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.

The Hatch Restore 1 product is more or less useless without connecting it to the app, and the app installation procedure more or less forces you to sign up for a paid monthly subscription. To be clear, I could not see any way to complete the installation without agreeing to a paid subscription--if there is any alternative, Hatch have clearly made an intentional effort to obfuscate that alternative.

If you want to cancel the subscription without being charged, you have one week, and they don't exactly make the cancellation process obvious, either.

To add to this portrait of greed, I only purchased a new Hatch because I wasn't able to use the one my friend tried to gift me. He'd bought one, used it a few times, but it never really stuck for him as a matter of daily routine. So, one day when I expressed interest, he said that I could have his old one.

Except not. When I tried to connect his Hatch Restore 1 to my phone, it told me that it was not able to register it, asking me if I was attempting to share it with a friend, or if I was sure I'd bought it from an authorized retailer and that it hadn't been previously used, etc. It outright refused to continue and required that I submit a support ticket, i.e., get permission from Hatch to let my friend gift me his old Restore 1. I put the ticket in, and after a couple of days with no reply, decided to just buy my own. Excuse me, but what right does Hatch have to insert themselves into this process? If my friend wants to give me an item that he paid for (i.e., his property), I shouldn't have to go and get approval from Hatch. They even had the audacity to ask me (in the app) what I "hoped to gain" by accessing this device! Hatch, it's absolutely none of your business! The second my friend purchased that device, it became his property, it's not your place to decide whether or not he can gift it to a friend, but your motives are crystal clear.

A portrait of greed: A company that tries its hardest to force users into paid subscriptions and then tries to create artificial scarcity by making sure that if you want a Hatch, you have to buy a new one. I guess if my friend doesn't want his Restore 1, he might as well throw it away?

A company that prioritizes their own monetary gain over the experiences of their customers. Their motives and intentions are clear--Hatch only cares about Hatch, and they'll abuse their own paying customers to wring out every last dime they possibly can. Do not do business with this company!

Train wreck of a product. No phone number, customer service is nonexistent, YOU must pay to return their defective product. So you will lose $20 to return it ground via USPS. Now you are out defective product cost and return shipping. Then good luck receiving your refund. Pass, just say no, more junk made in China.

I wanted to love the Hatch Restore 2 because the colors and sounds are nice and it has a sleek modern feel, but it is such a piece of trash. The sound cuts out after two seconds no matter how many times I reset it and after months of contacting customer service. It was supposed to be a Christmas gift, but did not arrive until toward mid to late January, took over a month and half to then get a refund. It worked on and off while I had the subscription free trial and now that the pay subscription ended, it never works. My husband and I had to contact them at least 10-15 different times to hound them for the refund. I thought about trying the "improved" Hatch 3 for a second, but then remembered the nightmare of Hatch 2. Run away.

I’m so mad I could spit nails. I ordered a Hatch Rest as a baby shower gift and had it sent directly to the recipient. They received it just fine. Two days later I receive an unexpected package from USPS and I open it to find another Hatch Rest. My credit card was billed twice and when I go to contact customer service, there is no working phone number, and after much searching, they want me to print a return label and drop it off at the nearest post office at my expense. We live in the middle of nowhere and do not have a post office. Shall I go buy a printer and dive 20 miles to get to a post office? Why no customer service? Why no working phone number? Why am I receiving the same gift as the person I sent it to? Do we just send the same thing to the sender? To top it off, I find out it’s a subscription service. Is my card going to be charged for that as well, and TWICE? I started a dispute at my bank, but stay far away from this company because they will mess up and it will cost you time and money to fix their mess. I charge $50 an hour by the way.

After seeing a promo for their new product on Shark Tank, promoted by Chris Sacca, their Shark Tank investor, I made the mistake of giving them my money for one of their new devices which I never received.

At the time of purchase, I was given a ship date of 5/8/2020. When the device didn't ship, I reached out for an ETA and on 5/11 I received a response telling me it was my fault I was unable to read their website correctly and that shipments would begin on 5/13. I was a little insulted by the email, there was no misunderstanding, the site clearly stated ship date of 5/8, nowhere was the date 5/13 to be found and nowhere were the words shipments beginning, it very clearly stated an exact shipping date. So, I reached back out and received another insulting email telling me I wasn't the only person who couldn't read, there were others as well.

In the interim, I reached out to the CEO, Ann Crady Weiss, who apologized, told me the real reason was they got overwhelmed, and that she had escalated my concern and I would receive contact within 24 hours, and "very likely much sooner", I never heard back at all. I reached back out to Ann to let her know about the lack of response from a supervisor and the new insulting email from her customer service rep but never got another response. I also reached out to Chris Sacca and have yet to get a response from him as well.

With no help from Hatch, I reached out to Amazon Payments who I used to pay for the transaction and they are still looking into it.

In the mean time, I received an email from Hatch stating my order had been cancelled and a refund issued, but, as of this posting, no refund has been issued. While I know it can take some time to show up on a credit card, if the refund had been issued, Amazon Payments would have notified me immediately, they have no record of it.

So, I paid for a product with a stated shipping date and delivery time and then never received it. I was told by the CEO someone would reach out and assist me, that never happened. My order was cancelled and I was told a refund was issued, that never happened. What did happen is a flippant customer service agent accused me twice, as well as other customers, of not being able to read.

Now that I've had an issue, I've become aware that the company does not have a published phone number. This would have been a red flag to me and should be a red flag to any consumer, but with the promotion by Shark Tank and Chris Sacca personally, I didn't do the proper research, what is becoming an expensive lesson. I've also now seen other reviews for the company about the poor customer service.

I would highly discourage anyone from trusting this company. All I got in exchange for my trust, and my money, was lies and insults.