Published: January 16, 2026
My Nüborn Baby arrived in October, and now that I’ve had a few months to get used to it, I thought I’d write up a review, in case you were thinking of getting one for yourself.
People rave about Nüborns, after all; almost everyone who’s ever gotten one of the company’s flagship Baby products will tell you how amazing their life became once it arrived.
At the risk of spoiling this review: that hasn’t exactly been my experience so far. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves.
I’ve gotten one Nüborn Baby previously, but that was several years ago, and so I’ve forgotten a lot about the initial product onboarding and user experience. I was curious to see what’s new, and how the product has improved. (Turns out: not much.)
Ordering and delivery
I understand that logistics are complicated with this sort of product, but even I find it a little ridiculous that Nüborn is running lead times of around 40 weeks, on average, just to get a new Baby where it’s going.
This is to say nothing of the ordering process itself; it’s often not particularly easy to secure an order to even start that clock. Sometimes they’re out of stock for months—or even years!—and you might just have to keep trying until you can finally get one sent your way.
I might understand this for a product that was new to the market, but Nüborn has been sending out essentially the same Baby model for ages now. Seems like there should’ve been some efficiency gains somewhere along the way, and it makes you wonder where the company is investing its efforts, exactly. (Nüborn’s parent company, Evolütion, is notorious for moving extremely slowly.)
When you finally do manage to get your Nüborn Baby order placed, though, watch out: while shipping is technically free, if you want to guarantee the best chance of successful delivery without damage or defect, it can cost thousands of dollars, depending on where you live and what previous agreements you may have made with a delivery insurance company. (Note: this is US only; I’m told other countries have a better system.)
The marketing—and some owners—say this is unnecessary. And yes, you can technically choose free delivery, and you might be fine if you do. But the odds of something going wrong are a lot higher than most people will be comfortable with, and so paying the extra and getting a third-party delivery specialist involved is likely the best choice for most people.
Worth noting: there is apparently a legitimate secondhand market, but while I haven’t looked into it myself, I’ve heard dealing with it is mostly just as frustrating, expensive, and time-consuming (if not more so).
Pricing
As the marketing states, the cost of the Nüborn Baby is technically free. However, this, too, is misleading. On top of the delivery costs above, your ability to get a Baby for free depends on several factors that are outside your control.
To reserve your Nüborn, you and your partner will both be forced to pass a genetics test. If either of you fail, you may still be able to get a Nüborn, but you may need an add-on the company refers to as “fertility treatment,” which is administered by a third-party company, and which costs many thousands of dollars.
These third-party up-sells can improve your chances, but there’s no guarantee of success (and even if they do work, delivery is still just as slow).
So again, this is an area where your costs might be “free,” but could very easily balloon. As you can already begin to see, the marketing on this product is pretty free-wheeling.
Features
Ok, so it’s hard to find a Baby in stock, and it costs a lot to reserve and deliver. That must mean it’s really good, right?
Well…I wouldn’t say I’ve been too impressed so far.
For beginners, my Baby was not delivered in the condition I’d been led to believe I could expect. It needed a handful of repairs and adjustments right out of the box (minimally invasive, fortunately, but even so: it doesn’t instill confidence to pay for repairs on a brand-new product).
Even beyond those immediate issues, however, all was not smooth sailing. Virtually none of the Baby features showcased in the marketing materials—smiles, cooing, etc.—seemed to be present at all! In fact, the only thing that seemed to work on my Baby was the alarm.
I made some calls about this, and it turns out this is expected; the Baby model arrives with an extremely minimal operating system, and requires major updates to unlock almost all of its capabilities.
I wouldn’t mind this so much, except that it apparently takes several weeks (or even months!) for the downloads to complete. Even extremely basic features, such as the smile display, laugh sound, and personalized attachment, can take months to properly install. Apparently some of the more advanced features, like speech, can take years to even begin working, let alone to work well.
I can confirm that once the smiling feature finally finished downloading (after about a month), it is a huge hit, and undeniably charming. Facial recognition also seems to be kicking in, and working well. I’d even go so far as to say this feature makes my day. But honestly, it would be nice if they could just ship with that update.
Charging and maintenance
Nüborn marketing promises Baby can simply eat “for free” from their mother, but if you read the fine print, it turns out not all Babys and mothers are fully compatible—and even if they are, you still might need to supplement with a specialized product called Baby Formüla—which of course is purchased separately from yet another third-party company. (There seems to be an entire ecosystem of Baby add-on companies. Seems like a lot for such a “natural” product that’s supposed to be so cheap.)
Formülas range in price and quality, but most are somewhat expensive, and your Baby may not accept all formulas well. So the cheapness of feeding is pretty overstated. Again, the trend of misleading marketing continues.
Speaking of which: many owner reviews might lead you to believe Baby isn’t complicated to maintain, which is true in some ways but not others. Regardless: most omit how often the maintenance is required. I didn’t get more than a few hours of uninterrupted sleep for months after the thing showed up, since it constantly needs to be recharged in the middle of the night. I find myself perpetually behind on hygiene, errands, cooking, cleaning, and self-care, because by the time I get the Baby to sleep, I have (optimistically) about 45 minutes before the next time the alarm goes off.
The Baby charges two ways; it can get energy from the mouth port, and from sleep mode. But disappointingly, both are required (you can’t simply add more sleep to compensate for less food, or vice versa), and neither battery lasts very long at all. In addition, it can be a surprisingly huge challenge to enable sleep mode to begin with.
Ideally, if I were redesigning this product, I think I’d only require sleep, and allow food to be added in as an optional secondary energy source later. This would solve a lot of the problems with product onboarding; you could go longer between charges, and you would have a lot less to clean up. But sadly, this is not the case.
Oh, right—I didn’t mention the cleaning.
The Baby regularly emits various noxious residues from its lower ports (and occasionally from its main feeding port), which means the model needs to be cleaned almost constantly. In fact, in my experience, it gets itself dirty again in the middle of cleaning pretty frequently. (Sometimes it even gets me, too. At times I wonder if this thing’s actually just programmed for these sneak attacks and nothing else.)
While you can invest in reusable protective filters to minimize cost, most households will probably find the added maintenance overhead prohibitive, and will prefer to spend more money on the disposable variety. Either way—you guessed it!—you’ll have to buy them from a third-party company.
Mostly, the Baby doesn’t technically require most of these add-ons, but there’s a wide range of products to smooth out all the above issues and help with updates, and you’ll almost certainly want to invest in several of them just for your own sanity, if not for the continued wellbeing of the Nüborn itself.
User interface
Despite the Nüborn having a range of needs, there’s only one kind of warning indicator (i.e., the loud crying noise), and it’s extremely aggravating. You can’t change the sound, snooze the alerts, or even adjust the volume.
To make matters worse, it’s often unclear why the alarm is going off in the first place. You’re regularly forced to try everything you can think of to get it to stop, but even when you’re finally successful (possibly for entirely unknown reasons), the alert will probably just go off again soon anyway.
I thought maybe my Baby was defective, but I was assured this is very normal.
Honestly, it’s a miserable user experience, and for as long as the company has been making these things, you’d think at least one product manager would’ve come along with some better ideas.
(As mentioned, I do have an older Baby model from several years ago, but honestly, the alarm on that one still goes off for no clear reason sometimes, too.)
Final verdict
As you can tell, I’m not impressed. Frankly, aside from a few cute moments that tend to be few and far between, I can’t help but wonder if all the positive reviews are just bot spam.
…Actually, hang on, my Baby just smiled really big at me. And she just laughed, too!
Never mind, this is amazing.