Enjoy Nest Hub’s Sleep Sensing feature for free all the way through 2023

The writing has been on the wall with Google announcing in November that along with some upgrades to the sleep tracking feature on the Nest Hub 2nd Gen, we could expect for Fitbit Premium to become a requirement in order to use it. Originally, Google offered Sleep Sensing as a free trial period through 2022 and planned to push it to a paid service via Fitbit Premium in 2023; but they are now backpedaling on this announcement and extending that free trial period. A lot.

Fitbit Premium requirement delayed until 2024

Thanks to some eagle-eyes over at 9to5 Google, it looks like Google has updated the Nest Hub 2nd Gen product page, now showing the Sleep Sensing feature available ‘free through 2023’. Not that I didn’t trust that, but I checked it out for myself and it is clearly listed on the Google Store with an end date of 2023 right on the top of the Sleep Sensing portion of the Nest Hub product page.

It isn’t clear at this point why Google is extending the date, but it’s pretty awesome. For those of us that gifted some Nest Hub 2nd Gen devices to friends and family for the holidays, it’s a great perk to know that they can use those devices to get some pretty accurate sleep tracking for the duration of 2023. With that in mind, users could test the Nest Hub’s Sleep Sensing feature, see how they like it for an extended period, and decide to pay for it later if it seems useful to them.

Fitbit Premium runs either $9.99/month or $79 for the year if paid all at once. If you are a Pixel Watch user and can really leverage these extra features, maybe the service is worth that to you. But after an extended period, if you feel the tracking isn’t necessary for your enjoyment of your devices, you could just skip it, too. For now, I’m in the latter camp, but having a full year to really test out this Sleep Sensing feature might just change my mind. At least now I’m free to test it out.

My hope is Google has Fitbit Premium in a better spot by the cut off date to make it a bit more alluring to customers like myself who don’t quite see the need for it currently. Something like tight integration between the Nest Hub and Pixel Watch would be one really cool way to do that, and I’m thrilled that I’ll get a full year to mess around with it before having to make any decisions on that front.