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Comment by amanzi | Hacker News Reader

I'm a fan of Insight Timer (https://insighttimer.com/). It has tons of free guided meditations as well as meditation courses that you can pay for. I tried both Calm and Headspace and I just didn't like the feel of them. Both seemed to tick all the cliche monetisation strategies of mobile apps.

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I used headspace for a while, but then got hammered so heavily with ads so I heard the dude's voice for months on endm, interrupting my videos. To a point that I just can't stand him any more and considered reporting.

I don't understand how an app that claims to want to help you meditate can invest so heavily on harassing users with ads everywhere. This really pushed me off meditation altogether to be honest

I had the same experience. I'm in the correct target demographic because I'm interested in meditation and not yet doing it actively, but the ads have reduced my interest in meditation more than anything has increased it.

This is the first time I'm hearing anything about headspace and the whole idea of ads in a meditation app is simply absurd! Even if they don't play while you're supposed to be meditating, aren't ads one of the features of our world which is known for detracting from mindfulness?

The ads are not in the app itself - headspace seems to spend a lot in marketing and you can get hammered by repetitive ads promoting it in youtube, etc.

End result is associating the app with annoying ads.

Yeah my bad I wasn't clear enough. You get hammered on Youtube and the like, with short sentences that are used as well in the app itself and with the same voice.

So you end up hating the guy and its made phrases. A shame, really.

I am also fan of Insight timer. I had tried out a bit of headspace and calm earlier, found Insight to to work better for me.

I use it also and always recommend it, at worse you get a good timer for free. I probably do guided about 25% of the time mostly because I'm looking to learn a new meditation style. Also it has free yoga nidra courses, which to me is maybe more powerful than meditation. But no one talks about it the same.

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