Why Nightlight will always be free

Some decisions are about features. This one is about a moment. You wake at 3:12 with your heart going and the dream still in the room. You reach for your phone. Whatever happens next should ask nothing of you.

The moment of need

The small hours are when nightmares tend to arrive, because REM sleep, the stage richest in vivid dreams, grows longer toward morning.^[1] They are also when you are least able to deal with a log-in screen, a forgotten password or a trial that quietly ended. So we made a rule early on: help at night is free, forever. Nightlight works offline, never asks you to sign in, and never shows a price, a badge or a notification.

Night rules

• Ember on black. No blue light and nothing bright. In a small lab study of 12 adults, reading on a bright tablet for four hours before bed suppressed melatonin, shifted the body clock later and made falling asleep slower than reading a printed book.^[2] That was long evening use, not a minute in the night, but the cautious choice is clear: keep it dim and warm.
• At most three choices. Big targets, nothing to read, nothing to decide twice.
• It fades to black by itself. After ten seconds without a touch, the screen goes dark. A tap brings it back.

What is inside

Nightlight opens with breathing. Phone on your chest, eyes closed: a soft haptic pulse slows from about 60 to 50 beats a minute, with a short swell in and a long fade out. Breathing with a long exhale lifted mood and slowed breathing in a 2023 randomised study.^[3] Then, at most three choices:

• Hear a voice you love. A partner, parent or friend records a few words in daylight. At night it plays with the breathing: it was a dream, you are home.
• Say it out loud. Twenty seconds to get the dream out of your head. The voice note waits for the morning, when you can decide whether to rewrite it.
• Back to sleep. Slow rain and a body scan that fade out by themselves. If sleep doesn’t return in about twenty minutes, Nightlight gently suggests getting up for a while, in low light, and coming back when sleepy. This is stimulus control, part of the insomnia treatment sleep medicine strongly recommends.^[4]

Nightlight is not a treatment, and it does not replace one. If a nightmare leaves you with thoughts of harming yourself, please call your local emergency number or reach out to a crisis line.

How the rest pays for it

Free has to be paid for somehow. The usual answers are ads or data, and we have ruled out both: there are no ads in Baku, ever, and we never sell data or use it for advertising. Baku Plus, a subscription for the whole method (unlimited rewrites, the Guide, programs and insights), is how Baku pays for itself, including the night mode. If you never pay, Nightlight is still yours.

We think this is also simply right. Help for the hardest minutes of the night should not depend on whether someone can afford it, or remembered to renew. You can see what Nightlight looks like on our home page.