It doesn't need one. Sleep Eight decided to make it that way.

I've been having a lot of trouble with sleep lately, and it's really impacting my work and life. Apart from working with my Dr I was seriously considering ponying up the big bucks for a Sleep Eight until I found that literally all of it's features rely on the cloud, and a monthly subscription, for no legitimate reason whatsoever.

Look, I'm for subscriptions when they make sense. Have a service that requires a lot of infrastructure? Subscription. Something that needs continuous dev work? Subscription. All I ask is that the subscription be kept low so that it's affordable and everyone can be happy. But that's not how it goes. Two things end up happening:

1. They price the subscriptions at $10-15+ per month making it quite a large expense in aggregate. They're not being priced the fair cost of maintenance or development, they're being priced to make even more money.
2. The device doesn't need cloud infrastructure at all, they just chose to do it that way to retain control and keep you dependant.

Both are what's happening with the Sleep Eight. You literally can't use any of the sleep detection features (things that run locally on a cheap smart band from 10 years ago) without the cloud. Its insane. There is no good reason that couldn't be done on device.

I refused to buy it because of their business model, but they're really the only game in town for this kind of product. They seem to be getting away with it, so I guess fuck me.

The more features something has the more there is to go wrong.

I am also immediately suspicious of any mundane item or appliance that wants internet access.