The OMNIVEX Spoon+ is a brushed-steel spoon with a small LED in the handle, an app, and a pricing page. The spoon itself costs $19. Using it as a spoon costs $4.99 a month.
OMNIVEX calls this “Spoon-as-a-Service.” I call it the moment I understood that every object in my house will eventually ask me for money.
What you get
Out of the box, Spoon+ comes with a 30-day free trial of Spoon+ Essentials, which includes scooping, stirring, and “basic soup support.” Premium tiers add features like Cereal Mode, which tracks how many bites of cereal you take and congratulates you on milestones, and Yogurt Insights, which I declined to learn more about.
To be fair, the trial period is great. It’s a very good spoon. It has a nice weight, a deep bowl, and the LED glows a soft blue when you’ve been holding it too long, which is helpful if you are the kind of person who forgets they’re holding a spoon.
Day 31
On day 31, the LED turned amber and the app sent a notification: “Your Spoon+ trial has ended. Your spoon is now in Limited Mode.”
Limited Mode, I learned, means the spoon still physically exists but the bowl is “software-locked to 40% capacity.” I don’t fully understand how a spoon can be software-locked. When I tried to eat soup, the spoon vibrated gently and displayed the message “Upgrade for full scoops.”
I ate the soup with a regular spoon from a drawer. It cost nothing. It asked for nothing. It has no LED. I have never felt so free.
Customer support
I contacted OMNIVEX to cancel. The cancellation page required me to explain why I was leaving, offered me a discount, offered me a different discount, asked whether I’d “talked to my spoon about this,” and finally informed me that cancellations must be requested by mail.
Verdict
Spoon+ is a genuinely good spoon wrapped in a genuinely bad idea. Half a star for the free trial, one star for the LED, which is now the best nightlight I own, since I can’t get it to turn off.