What Happened to SleepyTi.me? (And Is There Still a SleepyTi.me App?)
SleepyTi.me, the bedtime calculator that its creator said drew about 30,000 visits a day by early 2012, now exists only as a redirect: typing the address sends you to the sleep calculator on Sleepopolis, a mattress review site, and has done since the summer of 2022. The original creator never released an official app that we could find, so the "Sleepytime" apps in the App Store and Google Play come from other developers. This post reconstructs what happened from the creator's own account, archived copies of the site and press coverage, and lists the apps and websites that now do the same job.
How SleepyTi.me started
SleepyTi.me was built by David Shaw as a weekend project, which he first shared on Hacker News in October 2010 under the title "Review sleepyti.me bedtime calculator (my weekend project)". In a February 2012 Hacker News thread, where the site reached the front page with 122 points, Shaw wrote that he had created it "originally to learn jQuery and for my own personal use", improved it with feedback from Hacker News and Reddit, and then saw it spread on Reddit and StumbleUpon. By then it served about 30,000 visits a day according to his Google Analytics, earned a modest income from banner ads, and had been covered by Lifehacker, MSNBC, the Toronto Star, The Next Web and CNET. The Next Web wrote about it in October 2011, and The New York Times' Bits blog gave it a test run in February 2013.
The idea fit on one screen. As an archived copy from 2016 shows, you picked the time you had to wake up and the site counted backwards in 90-minute sleep cycles, telling you to plan for the fact that "the average human takes fourteen minutes to fall asleep". A second button did the reverse for going to bed right away, and the page noted that "a good night's sleep consists of 5-6 complete sleep cycles". An early version of the code is still on GitHub, a single HTML file with jQuery.
Not everyone was convinced by the method. Commenters in the same Hacker News thread pointed out that cycle length varies between people and that the 14-minute assumption breaks down for anyone who takes longer to fall asleep, while others reported waking up noticeably easier. Both criticisms still apply to every calculator built on the same idea, including ours, and we return to them below.
The sale, the redesign and the redirect
The site changed hands in 2019. Callum Booth, who wrote about losing his favourite sleep tool in The Rectangle in June 2023, traced the sale to a Reddit comment saying the original creator sold the site that year. The Internet Archive's captures show what followed:
| Date of capture | What sleepyti.me showed |
|---|---|
| June 2019 | The original one-page calculator, titled "sleepyti.me bedtime calculator" |
| June 2020 | The same calculator, now loading WordPress files |
| July 2022 | A rebuilt page titled "Sleep Cycle Calculator - Optimal Bedtime and Wake up Times by Age", with a long article under the calculator |
| August 2022 onwards | A permanent redirect to sleepopolis.com/calculators/sleep/ |
The switch to the redirect happened between the archive's captures of 6 July and 21 August 2022. According to its About page, Sleepopolis has been owned and operated by Pillar4 Media since 2020. Its calculator page describes itself as "formerly the Sleepytime Sleep Cycle Calculator", asks for your age as well as a time, and sits inside the site's mattress, pillow and bedding navigation.
For former users, the complaint was less about the arithmetic, which still works, than about everything around it. Booth called the result "a full-scale advert for a mattress company", and the Reddit threads that followed the change, including one where a developer announced a replacement built for that reason, describe the same loss of a quick, dark, distraction-free page.
Is there a SleepyTi.me app?
We found no official SleepyTi.me app from the original developer, then or now. Searches for "sleepytime app" return apps from other developers that borrow the name and the 90-minute idea:
- Sleepytime Sleep Scheduler for iPhone, by Cellaflora Design (App Store)
- sleepytime calculator for iPhone and sleepytime for Android, the companion apps to the sleepytime.cc website (App Store, Google Play)
- Sleepytime for Android, by a different developer (Google Play)
None of these is affiliated with the original site. If what you want is the original experience of opening a page and getting a bedtime in a few seconds, a website saved to your home screen comes closer than an app, because it needs no install, account or permissions.
Where former users went
Several free websites now copy the original's approach of 90-minute cycles plus a fall-asleep buffer:
| Website | How it differs | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| SleepUtility | Our own site. Adds nap, sleep debt, caffeine and jet lag calculators, and an adjustable fall-asleep time | Free, no ads, works without an account |
| sleepytime.cc | Closest in look to the original | Recommended by Booth as simple and ad-free |
| I'm Sleepy | Minimal calculator | Recommended by Booth as simple and ad-free |
| sleeptyme.ca | Built in 2020 as a direct response to the redirect | Announced on Reddit by its developer |
| Sleepopolis | Where sleepyti.me now points; asks for your age | Mattress review site with affiliate links |
We compared these and other options in more detail in The 7 Best SleepyTi.me Alternatives.
Does the 90-minute method still hold up?
The Hacker News sceptics in 2012 were right that a calculator cannot know your personal cycle length, which typically ranges from about 70 to 120 minutes and changes across the night. What the method does well is give a better starting point than a random alarm time. Waking at the end of a cycle means waking from lighter sleep, and sleep inertia, the groggy feeling after waking, is strongest when an alarm interrupts deep sleep. The 14-minute buffer is the weakest part of the original, which is why newer tools, including the SleepUtility calculator, let you set your own fall-asleep time.
The method also says nothing about whether you are getting enough sleep. The American Academy of Sleep Medicine recommends at least 7 hours for adults, so a well-timed 4.5-hour night still leaves you short, a point covered in Is 6 Hours of Sleep Enough?
Conclusions
- SleepyTi.me redirects to Sleepopolis and has since the summer of 2022. Archived captures place the switch between July and August 2022, three years after the creator sold the site.
- There is no official SleepyTi.me app. The apps with similar names come from other developers and are unrelated to the original site.
- The original's method lives on in free websites. sleepytime.cc, I'm Sleepy, sleeptyme.ca and SleepUtility all count in 90-minute cycles without ads, and saving one to your home screen recreates the old one-tap experience.
- The calculation is a starting point. Cycle length and the time it takes to fall asleep vary from person to person, so the best results come from adjusting the fall-asleep time and noticing which wake-up times feel easiest.