I’m only half joking when I say that Eight Sleep’s temperature-controlling mattress cover improved my marriage. A good night’s sleep is elusive in my house. I’m always cold, my spouse runs hot. We battle nightly over the thermostat. So when I first reviewed an Eight Sleep cover, it was a revelation. I could curl up and drift off into a toasty slumber. My spouse could make like a penguin and sleep on a slab of ice.
The only thing I didn’t like was the nearly $1,900 price and the $19 monthly subscription. Fast-forward two years, and alas, I’m in the same pickle with Eight Sleep’s latest ludicrously expensive mattress cover: the Pod 4 Ultra, which starts at just under $4,700 for a Queen. Not including the mandatory annual membership, which starts at $199.
I can hear my mom’s ghost screeching. $4,700!? Are you insane?! Sleep is free! It’s a fair criticism, but good sleep is hard to come by. Eight Sleep’s whole pitch is that it helps create the perfect sleep conditions. The cover contains tubing that runs water from a control hub to separately warm or cool each side of the bed. It’s embedded with sleep-tracking sensors, plus haptic motors for a silent alarm, letting the bed vibrate at a gradually increasing intensity to gently wake you up. Lastly, there’s an AI-powered Autopilot feature that adjusts the temperature as you sleep so you theoretically get a better night’s rest. Since it’s a cover, you can zip it onto your existing mattress instead of having to shell out for an entire smart bed. (Those can cost up to a whopping $10,000.)
The latest Pod 4 Ultra does all of that, too — and it’s quite good at it. So why is it so much more expensive? Some of that is good ole price inflation, but the Ultra bundle also adds a base. It slots into your existing bed frame and lets you adjust the bed’s elevation and position. The cover itself has also been refined so it’s quieter, 20 percent thinner, and has twice the cooling power. Sleep tracking now includes snoring detection — and if you shell out for the base, the bed automatically lifts the head area to reduce said snoring. Eight Sleep also added touch controls via two “tap zones” on either side of the bed that let you adjust temperature, dismiss alarms, and adjust bed position without needing your phone.
It pains my penny-pinching soul that I love these updates.
Hear me out. I know no one needs a fancy $2,000 base to tweak their bed’s elevation. In my 36 years on Earth, stacking a bunch of pillows against the headboard has generally been good enough. But the bed elevating for you is regretfully delightful. On lazy Sundays, I hit the reading elevation preset and morph into a happy little shrimp while watching the latest brain-rotting season of Love is Blind. Cozying up with a book, feet and upper back elevated with my bed already warmed up for me is now my nightly routine. (It’s also the comfiest way to doomscroll.) There are two other presets for relaxing and sleeping, and you can set your own custom elevation, too.
Having the base also gets you a nifty snoring mitigation feature. When enabled, the bed will automatically lift when it detects snoring. It’s not perfect. I’ve woken up a few times to a moving bed. Even so, I’d rather be slightly disoriented by a moving bed than have to grumpily wake up my snoring spouse to get them to quiet down. Especially since I haven’t woken up every time. Sometimes I only know an adjustment happens because it pops up in Eight Sleep’s morning sleep report. Either way, I now have definitive proof that I snore much, much less than my spouse.
The main downside — besides the cost — is the base isn’t ideal if you have small wily pets. My cat Petey never viewed the bed as a foe before, but now that it moves, it’s become public enemy number one. It moves, he pounces, claws unsheathed. I’m afraid one of these days, he’s going to poke a hole in the Pod 4 Ultra — a device full of water at any given moment. Cats also love exploring under the bed, which led to an incident where he almost got pancaked by the bed lowering. It’s now a family rule that all cats must be accounted for before changing bed elevation.
I asked Eight Sleep about the seeming lack of safety features. “We have no reported cases of people or small pets being harmed by the Pod 4 Ultra Base,” says Sam Kang, Eight Sleep’s VP of hardware. “We also move the base very slowly to allow time for anything that may be underneath the lowering portion to get out of the way.” I still say you ought to be overly cautious, especially as there are no warnings within the app.
Bed elevation is cool, but the upgrade I love most is the touch controls. The tap zones, located on either side of the bed, are textured so you can easily feel them through the sheets. Double tapping raises the bed temperature, while triple tapping lowers it. A quadruple tap will let you cycle through bed elevation presets (e.g., reading, relaxation, sleeping, etc.). But it’s most helpful in snoozing or dismissing the silent alarm. Mine vibrates my side of the bed at 5:45AM so I can get ready for my cursed morning workout. All I have to do is roll over, pat the bed twice, and I don’t disturb my spouse. Previously, I’d have to blindly search for my phone, launch the Eight Sleep app, and dismiss the alarm that way. I was never quick enough, and the “silent” alarm is actually quite loud the longer you let it go. (The vibrations are quite powerful.) Adding the touch controls lets me use the silent alarm more confidently — and lets my spouse get some extra Zzzs.
The other updates are less flashy but improve the overall experience. The hub, for instance, is definitely quieter. With the Pod 2 Pro, it would occasionally whirr while filling the bed with water. It wasn’t too noisy, but it was loud enough that my spouse would comment. We don’t really notice the Pod 4’s hub, except when it’s time to refill the tank. It’s still kind of big — about the size of a slim gaming PC, but after a while you forget it’s there. The cover itself looks the same, but it’s now thinner and has redesigned tubing for better comfort and efficient cooling. I think I noticed when we first used the Pod 4 Ultra, but it’s not something that made a huge overall impact. It’s hard to say whether the cooling is also two times more powerful, though I do feel like it’s ever so slightly faster at reaching the desired temperature.
Expensive bed tech is inherently ridiculous. A mattress has one job: to be a comfy place for you to sleep. Adding tech to it overcomplicates one of the most natural things a human can do. But this is the age of optimization, and wellness influencers would have you believe that none of us sleep as well as we should. (Though, you could easily fix this by buying a supplement or product using a code in their bio. How else could mouth taping take over TikTok?) That sleepmaxxing has become a viral trend speaks to how much the average person wants to sleep better. In this environment, a $5,000 smart mattress cover — not even a mattress — that promises you the best night of fully optimized, AI-automated sleep is the most 2024 piece of wellness tech imaginable. It drives me bonkers that I can’t even argue with the results! Yes, it can be finicky at first, and it took months to really notice how much my sleep had improved. But the fact is my spouse and I, both lifelong insomniacs, have been sleeping like babies.
The last time I thought this hard about a bed was in my early 20s. After seven years of sleeping on paper-thin, rock-hard futons, I’d accumulated enough bodily pains that my doctor demanded I buy a proper mattress. Almost overnight, the pain that had been plaguing me for years disappeared. No one is more upset than I that switching from a regular mattress to an Eight Sleep product had similar, albeit less dramatic, results. Not once, but twice.
Even so, I still struggle with this price tag. Particularly since features like Autopilot, silent alarms, and sleep insights, are locked behind a mandatory $199 annual subscription that you pay for upfront. You can cancel after a year, so long as you’re okay with losing every single feature except manual temperature control. Eight Sleep says it does this to develop, maintain, and improve its smart features, but subscribing to your bed fundamentally feels wrong. Adjusting the temperature is the most important feature, but it’s not worth the entry price if that’s all you’re getting.
And yet, I remain tempted. It’s why I hate that I love this bed. On the one hand, it’s continually solved a major problem my spouse and I have with our sleep preferences. On the other, we still managed to sleep on a regular, not-so-smart bed in the past and could do so again. Even if we’d have to go back to battling over the thermostat. It’d be so much easier to make this decision if the Pod 4 Ultra sucked. But it doesn’t! Now my problem is figuring out how much a good night’s sleep is really worth.
