Tuck vs Miku (2026): iPhone Monitor vs $399 Radar Camera

Setup and cost — the rug-pull is the story

Miku Pro is $399 from mikucare.com or Amazon. That gets you the camera with the proprietary SensorFusion stack: a low-power radar (millimeter-wave / FMCW class), 1080p RGB sensor, microphone, and built-in temperature and humidity sensors. The hardware itself is the most technically ambitious in the category.

Here's where it gets ugly. In September 2023, Miku Inc. was acquired by Innovative Health Monitoring LLC. The new owner immediately moved the breathing and sleep tracking features that had shipped bundled with the original $399 purchase behind a new $9.99/month membership. Customers who had paid for the hardware specifically because of those features now had to pay again, monthly, to keep using them. The Register and CBS Sacramento covered the backlash; the Better Business Bureau profile shows 125+ unresponded complaints.

Tuck costs $0 in hardware. You use an iPhone you already own as the nursery device and another as the parent device. Any iPhone running iOS 17+ works. Tuck's free tier is a real monitor — continuous video and audio, two-way talk, cry alerts, basic sleep summary. Pro is $7.99/month or $79/year and adds AI scene understanding, full sleep diary, and personalized AI lullabies. The free tier is the product, not a trial.

Three-year cost for Miku with current subscription: roughly $759 ($399 hardware + 3 years of $9.99/mo, assuming the price doesn't move again). Tuck over the same window: $237. Different products, but the rug-pull risk is unique to Miku.

Video and audio — Miku's hardware is genuinely the best

Both stream 1080p video. Both do two-way talk. Both have cry detection. Miku has the more sophisticated sensor stack: the SensorFusion system fuses radar micromotion data with computer-vision optical flow on the RGB stream, plus the microphone and the environment sensors. When it works, it's the closest thing the category has to magic — true contactless breathing tracking through blankets and sleep sacks, which neither wearables nor optical-only systems can match.

When it works. The recurring 1-star complaint themes after the acquisition are: setup repeatedly fails (multiple users report 10+ uninstall/reinstall cycles), the device frequently goes offline, customer service is unreachable. The hardware capability is real; the post-acquisition reliability and support story isn't.

Tuck repurposes the iPhone camera, which is excellent in itself but inherits whatever placement you pick — bedside table, dresser, headstand. There is no radar, no breathing tracking, no environment sensors. The trade is flexibility and reliability of consumer hardware against the lost magic of contactless breathing.

AI and insights — Miku's analytics, Tuck's lullabies

Miku's analytics are the strongest data product in the category when you have an active subscription. Sleep state, breathing rate, total sleep, environmental overlay (temp + humidity), trends. The data is real and the UI is polished. Pre-acquisition, this was bundled with the hardware purchase. Post-acquisition, it's the primary thing the subscription gates.

Tuck's AI runs the other direction. Scene understanding via Gemini 2.5 Flash describes what's happening in the crib in plain language. Generative lullabies built on Mureka compose new music every night, in a cloned family voice if you opt into voice cloning. The morning summary is two lines, not a dashboard. Different problems, different answers.

The honest call: Miku is the better data product. Tuck is the better emotional product. The deciding question is whether you want quantified-self-style sleep data badly enough to accept the subscription model, the support quality, and the rug-pull history.

Sleep tracking — Miku wins on raw capability, gates it behind subscription

Miku's sleep tracking is genuinely best-in-class on capability — radar-based contactless breathing, fused with optical sleep-state classification and environment data, gives you a more complete picture of a sleep session than any other consumer product. Pre-September 2023, this was the reason to buy Miku. Post-September 2023, this is the reason to keep paying $9.99/month.

Tuck does asleep/awake detection and a morning sleep diary on the Pro tier. It does not try to compete with Miku's analytics depth and does not have radar-based breathing tracking — that's a hardware capability software alone can't deliver.

If contactless breathing tracking is a must-have and you'll accept the subscription, Miku is the right buy. If you would rather not pay $9.99/month forever, Miku is structurally not a fit.

Trust and privacy — the September 2023 rug-pull

Neither Miku nor Tuck is FDA cleared. Miku is explicitly not marketed as a medical device. The only FDA-cleared baby monitor on the US market is Owlet's Dream Sock (De Novo Class II, November 2023) — for vital signs, not video.

The September 2023 acquisition is the trust story. Innovative Health Monitoring LLC bought Miku Inc. and immediately retroactively gated previously-bundled breathing and sleep tracking behind a $9.99/month subscription. The Register and CBS Sacramento ran investigative pieces on the customer backlash. The Better Business Bureau profile shows 125+ unresponded complaints, indicating the new owner's customer service was not equipped to handle the volume — or chose not to. The App Store rating crashed from approximately 4.5 to 2.4 stars in the months following the acquisition. There is no public sign of this trajectory reversing.

Tuck hasn't launched publicly yet (target 2026). The stated posture: end-to-end encryption, US data residency, no cloud video by default, opt-in voice cloning. Generous-free tier from launch is a deliberate response to exactly the dynamic Miku created — Tuck's free tier is a real monitor, not a trial that converts. No installed base means no track record yet, which is its own caveat.

Travel and offline use — Tuck wins outright

Miku has a local-network mode for in-home use, which is more than most peers offer. But it is still Wi-Fi-dependent — there is no Bluetooth fallback, no cellular failover, no airplane-mode operation. In a hotel with captive-portal Wi-Fi or a cabin with no internet, the Miku is not usable.

Tuck is built for the offline case. When Wi-Fi drops, the parent and nursery iPhones fall back to Bluetooth Coded PHY — the longest-range mode of Bluetooth Low Energy that Apple exposes on iOS. Audio and a degraded video stream both pass over the Bluetooth link, no router required, no internet required. It works on flights, in hotel rooms, at off-grid cabins, and during any 3 AM Wi-Fi outage.

If you travel with your baby, this gap matters. Miku is a stay-at-home product.

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