How Stillee works
How Stillee works
Stillee is an iPhone app for the night: falling asleep, waking at 3 AM, and the panic some nights bring. Around the night sit the daytime parts: breathing, NSDR and yoga nidra, a journal, and programs. This page shows how each part works, and why we built it the way we did.
Why we built it
Stillee started at 3 AM. One of us was awake in the dark, after leaving a job that took the early mornings and late evenings for freelance work, and finding that the freedom came with no floor.
Every meditation app on that phone offered a library, a search bar and a bedtime voice to someone already wide awake. In the moments that actually break people, the apps behaved like stores.
So we built for those moments first, and the rest of the app around them.
The decisions we kept
- The worst moments are free. The panic flow is free, forever, with no payment gate. So is the 3 AM mode, with every track that has "3am" in its name.
- No sales pitch at the wrong time. The app doesn't open the subscription screen or ask for a rating on its own while the panic flow is open, between 1 and 5 AM, during a session, after a low-mood check-in, on 3 AM content or inside a sensitive program.
- Nothing to keep you up. No 11 PM badges, no "your streak is at risk" notifications. Every track fades to silence instead of ending.
- One voice, and we say what it is. The guide is one synthetic voice, generated with text to speech from scripts we write.
- A small catalog. Curated by use case, "not a thousand-track library that takes a tour to navigate."
How we decide what goes in
We start from the research and name the technique, so you know what you're getting: cyclic sighing, paradoxical intention, progressive muscle relaxation, NSDR, an 8-week course built on the MBSR curriculum.
Every claim we make about the app is checked against a tiered claim list before it's written. The techniques are backed by trials. The Journal follows the same rule: each article starts from the primary literature, links every source, and says where the evidence is thin. More on that on the About page.
The parts
At night
Falling asleep
Tonight's pick, shelves for a mind that won't stop, and tracks that fade to silence, on a Sleep tab that's dark at every hour.
The 3 AM mode
Between 1 and 5 AM the app goes dark and quiet: no clock, no numbers, nothing to buy, a few doors to the night tracks.
Sound Bath
Recorded bowls, bells and long tones, and After the Wave, fifteen minutes for the hour after a panic attack.
NSDR and yoga nidra
Guided non-sleep deep rest at 8, 20 and 60 minutes, each ending in silence.
When panic comes
In the day
What it costs, and where it runs
iPhone only for now. Android is planned. You need an account: Sign in with Apple, Google, or email.
- Free, forever
- The panic flow · The 3 AM mode and the 3 AM tracks · The breathing Shapes · Your journal · After the Wave, from the Sound Bath shelf
- Premium
- $3.33 a month, billed $39.90 a year, or $6.99 month to month. Free trial on the yearly plan in the App Store. Cancel anytime. Adds: Every program, including the full 8-week MBSR course · The sleep library and the Sound Bath shelf · The deeper insights.
- Where it runs
- iPhone today. Android is planned.