One Year Later, The Eight Sleep Pod 3 Is Just As Dreamy

I admit, I wasn’t interested in testing the Eight Sleep Pod 3 when I was initially approached by a publicist in the spring of 2024. Maybe it was the pitch itself, which described Eight Sleep as “the intelligent sleep system that provides up to 32% better sleep.” At the time, I was covering sleep content for a few different websites, so it was a good fit in that regard, but I already slept pretty well. I wasn’t particularly interested in personal sleep metrics, and I had a great wool mattress cover that I wasn’t keen to replace. 

Long story short, I decided to give it a go for one month, write my review and move on with my life. More than a year later, I’m snoozing happily on the Eight Sleep Pod 3 (and missing it terribly whenever I travel). After spending all four seasons with this thing, I’m well equipped to talk about where it excels, where it could stand a little improvement and answer the biggest question of all — whether it’s worth the money.

Eight Sleep Pod 4

$2,649.00 from Eight Sleep

Meet the Eight Sleep Pod 3

For all its fancy tech, the Eight Sleep Pod 3 (yes, it’s the previous-generation technology) is really a glorified mattress cover that you wrestle onto your bed, which is powered by a computer tower-esque device that keeps watch as you sleep. But artfully hidden inside the cover is a network of tubes and sophisticated sensors that respectively heat and cool the mattress and keep tabs on your various biometrics. I could personally take or leave the sleep stats, but the heating and cooling feature is something that I never want to be without.

As a long-time sleep content writer, I’m pretty well versed in sleep hygiene. The term describes practices and habits that contribute to a restful night’s sleep, and at the top of the list is maintaining a comfortable sleep environment. That involves managing light, sound and temperature. Before the Pod 3 was actively managing sleep temperature for me, my efforts were pretty minimal. If it was cold, I wore long pajama bottoms and added a cozy layer on top of our comforter. If it was hot, I slept in pajama shorts instead of pants, turned on the ceiling fan and threw open the windows. If it was really hot, we ran the air conditioner.

These days, all I have to do is adjust the bed temperature a few degrees up or down before bed, and when I climb in, it’s perfectly heated or cooled to my preferences. Let me tell you, there is nothing like sliding between gently warmed sheets when it’s cold outside—except maybe stretching out on a cool bed on a hot summer’s night.

How It Works

The Eight Sleep Pod 3 is a three-part system made up of the mattress cover, the Hub (essentially the brains of the operation) and the Eight Sleep app. Here’s how they work.

The Cover

Thicker and a little lumpier than your average mattress cover, this piece of the system goes over the mattress like a fitted sheet. Both the Eight Sleep Pod 3 and the next-gen model, the Pod 4, are designed to accommodate mattresses of all sizes. We have a monster of a mattress that measures 17 inches tall, and it fits, but I’d be a little worried about exceeding that height. When it first arrived, the cover was folded and rolled into a lumpy ball, and it came with straightforward directions for getting it into place. It took some yanking, but we were able to wrestle it onto our mattress and there’s been no reason to take it off since.

The bed is heated and cooled with water, which runs through a network of tubing—the “active grid”—in the cover. The grid is under a plush but thin top layer, though it’s not completely hidden. You can vaguely see the outline of this network if you’re really staring at the bed with the sheets off, and when I lie down, I can run my fingers across the surface and feel a little give in spots. It feels similar to small bubbles, but it’s not particularly bothersome. My bigger quibble with the cover is the color. It’s black, which is far more noticeable under my favorite set of white sheets than the tubing.

According to Eight Sleep, the Pod 4 cover is designed to make the Pod’s technology undetectable, so your mattress feels like it always did. But I don’t think the Pod 3 performs poorly here—our mattress doesn’t feel softer or harder or even lumpier than it did before.

The Hub

A thick set of fabric-covered tubes situated at the head of the bed connects the cover to the Hub. This sleek piece of equipment sits alongside the bed to collect and process all the sleep data gathered from the sensors in the cover, while its removable nested reservoir holds and heats or cools the water that circulates through the tubing to manage temperature. It looks high-tech enough that I wasn’t concerned about trying to hide it. As a note, I don’t have a bedside table on my side of the bed, but situating both could pose an issue—just something to keep in mind.

The Hub has a quad-core CPU and there is a slight hum when it’s actively adjusting the mattress temperature. I find it similar to a fish tank, but it’s intermittent and I stopped noticing it pretty quickly (though my husband is a much lighter sleeper and says he sometimes hears it when it starts humming in the middle of the night). Eight Sleep says its new Pod 4 is 40% quieter, so it must be virtually silent.

The Eight Sleep App

To manage temperature in the Pod 3 and review sleep performance, you use the Eight Sleep app. An algorithm in the app and overall system called Autopilot is required for the first 12 months of use — when you buy the Pod 3 or Pod 4, you’re prompted to choose one of two annual plans:

• The standard plan is $17 per month, billed annually at $199.
• The enhanced plan is $25 per month, billed annually at $299.

Both plans include automatic temperature adjustments to help you sleep more peacefully, along with sleep and health reports and a vibrating/thermal alarm feature if you want to try waking up to something more pleasant than your phone. I’ve tried it, and it works, but I found I don’t really like waking up feeling hot. The standard plan also comes with a two-year warranty on your equipment, while the enhanced plan includes an extended five-year warranty. In other words, the extra $100 gets you three extra years of coverage. On the plus side, you only need one Autopilot plan to manage both sides of the bed, and you can add a partner for free so they can make adjustments on their side.

Technically, Autopilot and the Eight Sleep app are two different things, but you need the app to use Autopilot, and you can’t check out without choosing an Autopilot plan. I found it a little confusing at first, but once you download the app, it’s pretty straightforward. Basically, Autopilot is a feature that automatically adjusts the Pod’s temperature at night to help you stay asleep. It responds to fluctuations in bedroom temperature, overnight weather changes and your sleep biometrics to make real-time adjustments for better sleep. In 368 nights with the Pod 3, Autopilot has made 11,769 interventions, all in the pursuit of more high-quality rest for me. Does it work? Hard to say, though I am quite well-rested. My husband, on the other hand, turned Autopilot off months ago. He found that the automatic temperature adjustments were waking him up.

The app’s home screen gives you a snapshot of your scheduled bedtime (which you’ll plug in so that your bed is primed and ready for you when you climb in), along with the current bed temperature and your most recent sleep score and HRV, or heart rate value. You also get a little notification about how many adjustments Autopilot made to keep you in deep sleep.

On the report page, you can check pretty comprehensive sleep metrics, all of which are gathered from the sensors in the cover. These include:

• Sleep fitness score: Based on a scale of 1 to 100, this score reflects your sleep quality, routine and time slept. There’s a new score every morning telling you how well you slept the night before, and you can scroll back indefinitely for previous scores and stats if you want to compare.
• Sleep quality: Sleep quality is calculated by sleep stages, health metrics and snoring. The first metric shows much time you spend in different sleep stages (awake, REM, light and deep sleep). It’s laid out in both percentage and minutes or hours. Health metrics include your heart rate, heart rate value and breath rate. The snoring metric notes if and how much you snored. All three metrics are accompanied by a little box noting whether they were high or low based on what’s typical for you, and you can click into more details if you want them.
• Sleep routine: The sleep routine reflects how well you kept to your typical bedtime and wake up time. It also references sleep latency, or the time it took to fall asleep in bed and get up after waking in the morning.
• Time slept: This metric is exactly what you’d guess: how many hours you slept, along with a note about whether that’s optimal, good, fair or needs attention.

When I first began testing the Pod 3, I didn’t anticipate finding this sort of information to be helpful. But I’ve found that I kind of like checking my sleep score, especially after what feels like a particularly restful or restless night. Honestly, I find it pretty validating. Whether or not it’s accurate is harder to say. I don’t have a wearable or any other device for comparison purposes. According to Eight Sleep, its HR measurement is 99% accurate compared to “the gold standard (ECG).” That’s on the website and probably specific to the Pod 4, but I actually remember the same claim when the Pod 3 was the newest and coolest. 

If you’re looking for proof that the Pod 3’s sleep metrics are reliable, all I can offer is anecdotal evidence. When I wake up and feel like I’ve had a great night’s sleep, it’s reflected in the app. When I feel like I’m lying awake all night long, I’ll typically end up with a score in the 80s — very low for me. I do share the bed with my husband, but our scores are always unique. He’s an occasional snorer, and the app does a pretty impressive job of noting when he was sawing logs for six minutes.

The Best Part: Temperature Control

Eight Sleep spends a lot of time focusing on big-picture benefits: 15% increased deep and REM sleep, 15% enhanced cardio recovery, 25% improved sleep quality, and so on. Whether any of that is true or not, the reason I personally recommend the Pod 3 is entirely related to its ability to manage the temperature on my side of the bed. It is a game changer for comfort, and I say that as someone with a very expensive mattress and incredibly high-quality bedding staples.

In the app, there are 21 levels for temperature settings:

• +1 to +10: Warm to hot
• O: Neutral temperature, which is basically the temperature in your room
• -1 to -10: Cool to cold 

On the Pod 3, you can set three different temperatures each night. There’s one for bedtime, which continues for 15 minutes after you’ve fallen asleep, and options for “early” and “late.” The former refers to temperature for deep sleep, and the latter to temperature for REM sleep. You’re free to set the temperature as you see fit, but generally, deep sleep temperatures should be somewhat cooler and REM sleep temperatures should be neutral or warmer. That mimics what your body temperature naturally does as it moves through these sleep phases.

The very first night we slept on the Pod 3, my husband and I completely disregarded this biological truth and took wild guesses about what might be comfortable. It was early spring but unseasonably warm, so we both turned the temperature down and woke up freezing at separate points in the night. He turned his side off completely and I overcorrected my side enough that I kicked all the covers off. Night two was much better — we made only minute adjustments, just a notch or two cooler and/or warmer during the different sleep phases. Autopilot is designed to learn your temperature preferences, and that’s exactly what it’s done. In the dead of winter, when overnight temperatures are in the single digits, our upstairs bedroom can get pretty darn cold. Setting a higher bedtime temperature — a four for me and a five for my husband — made sliding into bed every night as pleasing as slipping into a warm bath. In the summer, a slightly chilled bed is refreshing in the best way. And in the fall and spring, we’ve both enjoyed making little adjustments based on what the weather’s doing and how we’re feeling.

Eight Sleep Pod 4

$2,649.00 from Eight Sleep

Call It An Investment

So, what do personalized temperature control and user-friendly sleep metrics cost you? The Pod 3, again, is the previous generation tech, so it’s the cheapest on offer — and it’s still comparable to the cost of a new mattress. Available in full, queen, king and California king, the smallest size is just under $2,500. The largest is $2,794 (both prices include the first year subscription to the enhanced Autopilot plan). It’s a lot, there’s no question, but it’s hard to put a price on good sleep. I was lucky enough to get a press sample, but I can see myself forking over the money down the road when the Pod 3 runs its course. I think it’s a smart, if expensive, solution for people who chronically overheat at night and those who have different temperature preferences from their bed partner. For the rest of us, it’s hard to see it as more than an indulgence. I can’t really say that it’s dramatically improved my sleep quality. While I miss the Pod 3 dearly when I travel, I’m not tossing and turning all night long, either. But now that I’m intimately acquainted with the luxury of heating and cooling my side of the bed, well, I don’t know how I can live without it.