Alarm apps bill in four currencies, and each one inflates differently

Delightroom, the Korean studio behind Alarmy, puts Alarmy at 82 million cumulative downloads, a figure the company reports itself. An app sold at that volume is a bet that the stock alarm fails for a very large number of people. What the apps in the category do about that failure varies more than the screenshots suggest. The ones that force you out of bed tie dismissal to a place. The rest charge you for staying down and leave the leaving to you.

Only apps tied to a place can make you leave the bed

Alarmy offers missions that end the alarm when you do something on the phone: solve arithmetic, shake the handset a set number of times, type a phrase. Those can all be done lying down. The photo mission is different. You register a spot in advance, say the bathroom sink, and the alarm stops only when the camera sees it. The barcode and QR missions work the same way with a code you stick somewhere. Sleep as Android, on Android only, runs a similar family it calls CAPTCHAs, which includes math, sheep counting, shaking, and a QR code or NFC tag scan. The NFC version asks for the least cleverness: tap the phone on a sticker that lives in another room.

The obvious counter is deleting the app while it rings. Sleep as Android’s changelog says it uses the Device Administrator permission so that a CAPTCHA cannot be dodged by uninstalling mid-alarm. That is the vendor’s own description of the behavior.

Everything else in the category prices the lie-in. Beeminder charges money, stickK charges money and an observer, and social apps charge exposure. None of those requires standing up, and none claims to. A person can pay the price at 6:10 and stay in bed.

An alarm app collects one of four currencies

Reading the category by what you hand over when you fail gives four currencies.

• Attention. The app interrupts you until you give it conscious effort. Examples: the louder escalating alarm, a math problem.
• Effort. The app demands a physical or logistical act. Examples: the photo of a registered spot, the NFC tag in the hallway, a shake count.
• Money. The app moves cash when you miss. Examples: Beeminder, stickK.
• Reputation. The app shows other people that you missed. Examples: stickK’s referee, DontSnooze, group chats with photo check-ins.

Attention and effort are paid to the app, in the sense that nobody receives them. Money is paid to the company, a charity or a stranger. Reputation is the only one paid to people you know. That difference in who collects turns out to predict the most important failure modes better than the size of the cost does. The oldest consumer example of the attention currency is a virtual pet, which billed schoolchildren in interruptions and charged no one else, as a look back at the 1996 Tamagotchi argues.

Currency	Typical app	Billed when	Who collects	How it inflates	Cheapest evasion
Attention	Math, shake, typing missions	At the moment of dismissal	Nobody	Repetition makes the task automatic	Do it asleep, or swap the mission to an easy one
Effort	Photo, barcode, QR, NFC	At the moment of dismissal	Nobody	Trips to the registered spot become routine	Photograph the spot from bed, or move the code
Money	Beeminder, stickK	After a deadline passes	A company, charity or friend	The price becomes a known number	Cap the stake, edit the data, stop paying
Reputation	stickK referee, DontSnooze	After a deadline passes	People you chose	Watchers stop looking or stop caring	Quit the group, choose lenient watchers

The table skips price and rating on purpose. Those columns tell you what an app costs to own. The ones above tell you what it costs to fail, and how that cost wears away.

Attention is the cheapest currency and the first to inflate

A math mission charges the very thing that sleep has already reduced. The bet is that a half-awake brain cannot multiply, so the alarm cannot be silenced until some part of it surfaces. For a first week that bet often holds. The inflation is that the hands learn the routine before the brain is asked. Tapping digits in a fixed order at a fixed time is a motor memory, which is the failure the Alarmy math-puzzle teardown walks through. Attention is a currency with no collector. Nothing receives it, so nothing notices when it is counterfeited. A person who solves the puzzle with eyes closed has paid in full as far as the app can tell.

The cheapest evasion is also built into the settings. Difficulty is adjustable, and an easy mission is a smaller bill. That is a feature for people who need a gentler wake-up and a hole for people who need a harder one, and the app cannot tell them apart.

We know of no controlled trial of puzzle alarms. The claim that the effect fades after weeks rests on user reports and the logic of repetition. It is plausible, not measured.

Effort holds until the route becomes routine

Effort is the one currency that does what the category promises: it moves a body. A registered photo spot, a barcode on the other side of the flat, an NFC tag across the hall. The currency is distance, and it is hard to fake at 6 a.m. because distance is physical.

Its inflation is slower and stranger. Once the route is routine, walking to the bathroom is the first step of getting up rather than a cost of it, which is the best possible failure for the app: it has been absorbed into the morning and stopped being a penalty. The trouble is what happens next to the person who needs the app. The same route that has become automatic also becomes a place where they can stop short, photograph the sink from the doorway, and go back. Neither Alarmy’s missions nor Sleep as Android’s CAPTCHAs, as publicly described, verify that you stayed upright afterwards. Alarmy sells a premium Wake Up Check that is described as continuing to check on you; the store copy does not explain how.

The cheapest evasion is relocation. A QR code printed once and stuck to the nightstand converts the mission back into a reach. The people for whom NFC wake-ups work tend to describe the opposite arrangement: the tag deliberately kept in a distant room.

Money buys certainty, then gets priced in

Money is the oldest currency in this table and the best studied. A 2010 randomized trial in the Philippines (Giné, Karlan and Zinman, American Economic Journal: Applied Economics) offered smokers a six-month savings account that returned deposits only if a urine test showed they had quit. Those offered the contract were about 3 percentage points more likely to pass the test at six months, and the effect held in surprise tests at twelve months. That is a small effect from a real-money, real-test arrangement, which sets a ceiling on what to expect from any similar stake on a wake time.

Beeminder is the alarm-adjacent example. It is a goal tracker, not an alarm, and it charges when a logged number falls off a line you chose. Its help center lists the pledge ladder as $0, $5, $10, $30, $90, $270, $810, $2,430 and $7,290; a first derailment on a $5 pledge costs $5 and raises the next to $10. Worked out for the uncapped case: five consecutive derailments cost $5 + $10 + $30 + $90 + $270 = $405, and seven reach $3,645. Real users set a cap, and lowering a pledge takes a seven-day wait, so those totals are the ceiling of the design rather than a forecast. The ladder exists to stop a price from settling into a line item.

Money has three failure modes the other currencies lack. The first is that wake time is not a number Beeminder can read, so someone has to log it, and a self-logged entry is a currency the payer can mint. The second is that a charge, once authorized, is a debt you chose, so there is no one to appeal to. The third is the quietest: a stake you can set to zero is not a stake. Beeminder’s own guidance puts the cap at a level scary enough to avoid but not so scary you would rather quit, and the second half of that sentence describes the exit.

Reputation is the only currency someone else spends

The social alarms are the newest entrants. stickK’s referee is the older version of the idea: a person you name confirms each progress report. DontSnooze, which is iOS only, asks for a short on-camera check-in and bills in exposure when you skip: a stray image from your own library goes to the friends you picked.

The evidence for reputation as a motivator sits mostly outside sleep. In a 2008 field experiment by Gerber, Green and Larimer (American Political Science Review), a mailing that listed a household’s past voting and its neighbors’ records raised turnout in a Michigan primary by roughly 8 percentage points, the largest effect of any mailing in the study. The experiment covered about 180,000 households and a one-time letter. It says that the knowledge of being seen can move a behavior; it does not say a friend group will keep looking at 6 a.m. check-ins in month four.

Reputation has the longest failure list, because it depends on other people. Watchers get tired. Members decide that nobody minds, and a group can slide into a shared belief that lateness is normal, a different failure from fatigue that pluralistic ignorance describes. The currency also needs a working audience in order to bill at all. A person with no one willing to watch cannot spend it, and a person who can pick every watcher can pick lenient ones, or find out that a friend can simply decline the role.

It is also the only currency that cannot be seen in the app store listing. A screenshot of a math puzzle tells you what you will pay. A group of five friends tells you nothing until the first miss.

No currency works without a bill that arrives

Putting the four side by side shows what they share. Each one requires a moment at which cost is assessed, and each currency has a cheap route around that moment. Attention and effort bill at dismissal, so the route is to shrink the task or relocate the tag. Money and reputation bill after a deadline, so the route is to remove the deadline’s teeth: lower the cap, edit the log, drop the group.

That makes the question for any app less “how big is the penalty” than “what is the cheapest thing I can do before the bill arrives, and does the app know I did it.” The apps with the best answers for that question tend to combine currencies. stickK adds a referee to a stake. Alarmy’s premium check adds a second round of effort after the first. A single currency tends to have one cheap exit; two usually have fewer.

Which of the four have your own failed mornings been paid in so far?

FAQ

Which alarm apps make you physically leave the bed?

Only the ones whose dismissal depends on a physical location: Alarmy’s photo and barcode missions and Sleep as Android’s QR and NFC options. The practical detail is placement. A code or tag kept inside the bedroom turns the mission into a reach, so the useful versions sit in another room such as the bathroom or kitchen. Alarmy also sells a premium Wake Up Check that keeps checking on you after the mission and can restart it, though its store copy does not say how it decides you are awake.

Is there research showing these apps work?

Not for the apps themselves. We know of no controlled trial of wake-up apps. The nearest evidence comes from adjacent fields. In the smoking trial by Giné, Karlan and Zinman, only 11 percent of the smokers offered the commitment contract signed up, and a currency nobody agrees to spend never gets collected. Karlan, one of the authors, is also a cofounder of stickK.

Can an alarm app charge more than one currency at once?

Yes, and stickK is the clearest example. A contract there can carry a cash stake and a named referee who confirms your progress reports, so a failure costs money and is also visible to a person you chose. stickK lets the forfeited money go to a charity, a friend or an anti-charity. Whether the anti-charity option changes behavior is a separate question this post does not settle.

Does a bigger stake make an alarm app work better?

Not on its own. Beeminder’s pledge only rises after a derailment and falls back through a seven-day wait, so the amount you face on a given morning reflects your history rather than your motivation. A stake you can cancel before the deadline, or pay once and stop caring about, behaves like a price rather than a penalty.