For employers
Shift workers carry insomnia at four to six times the rate of the general population, and it shows up on your books as absence, reduced output, and healthcare spend. That is the exposure the calculator further down sizes, with the arithmetic shown. This page opens with the pilot instead, because a safety manager cannot take an exposure number to a director and ask for a purchase order. They can take this.
The pilot
Size
One crew, one shift, or one terminal — 10 to 50 workers
Duration
90 days
Price
$499
flat, not per seat
Built for your actual roster and headcount, from the same published-figure arithmetic as the calculator below. A real number to open the conversation with your director, on day one, not day ninety.
Each person in the pilot gets their six clock times from their own roster and commute, on their own phone. Nothing to install, nothing for IT to approve, nothing about them that reaches us.
A ready-to-use anonymous adoption survey. You send it, you own the results, we never see a single response. That is how you get a real answer without the zero-data design becoming a reason you have nothing to show.
The exposure numbers re-run, a plain record of what launched and when, and your own survey results, assembled into one document built to be handed to a director, not read by one.
Credited toward Year 1 on the published Team tier if you continue past day 90 — if your annual seat cost is under $499, Year 1 is free. If you run your own survey and conclude it wasn’t worth continuing, tell us within 30 days of the pilot ending and the $499 is refunded. We don’t see your survey results and we don’t need to agree with your conclusion.
Not one advantage — four, and every competitor we checked is missing at least one.
Every light instruction is a lux level and a number of minutes, timed to the person's own body clock. The category's advice is qualitative — “seek bright light,” “avoid light before bed” — because nobody publishes a dose. This one does.
A hard-constraint solver fits the plan around a named immovable commitment — a court date, a second job, a kid's pickup time — rather than handing back generic advice that assumes an empty calendar.
Under the light routine this prescribes, the measured rate is about 50 minutes a day, which puts a night block at five to nine days. Most material in this category promises a few days. A crew told three that needs eight concludes the tool failed. Your supervisors already know the three-day claim is nonsense — print the real number and it reads as competence, not caution.
Permanent night, rotating, swing, and early-start rosters get different plans, not the same advice restated. A generic sleep-debt tool that treats every schedule as “an early start” breaks the moment a worker's actual bedtime lands after 4am, which is most of this workforce, most nights.
The question you’re right to ask
Nobody yet, or close to it. We have no deployment, no efficacy data, and no customer to name, and this page will not pretend otherwise. What we built instead of a testimonial is a pilot small enough to approve without a procurement cycle, priced low enough that being wrong costs you $499 for ninety days rather than a multi-year contract, and refundable on your own word if your own survey says it wasn’t worth it. If you want to be the first reference this page gets to cite honestly, this is how that happens.
Likely affected
35
at 29% prevalence
Lost productivity
$122,009
per year
Excess healthcare
$77,395
per year
120 shift workers × 29% = 35 likely to meet the criteria for insomnia. Prevalence among shift workers runs 29% to 38%, against roughly 6% in the general population. We use the bottom of that range.
Each of them costs an employer $976 a year in absenteeism and $2,530 in presenteeism, which is reduced output while still at work. A further $2,224 goes to treating conditions the sleep problem makes worse.
Cost figures: National Safety Council →Prevalence: StatPearls, Shift Work Hazards →
This is your exposure, not a saving. We make no claim about how much of it ShiftDawn removes, because nobody has measured that, including us. Anyone quoting you a percentage here is guessing.
29–38%
insomnia prevalence among shift workers, against about 6% generally
StatPearls, Shift Work Hazards →The arithmetic above is productivity and healthcare cost, because that is what the published figures support. It is not the argument that has actually moved a budget.
In Palm Beach County, Florida, IAFF Local 2928 is moving from a 24/48 shift to a 24/72. The county approved a three-year contract that hires 148 new fire fighters to make the schedule possible, and the new shift starts in January 2027. A Brigham and Women’s Hospital team is working to secure funding to follow the change.
“We wanted to make the switch to offset the fatigue our members were feeling on the current schedule and to improve recruitment and retention.”Brad Lavar, Local 2928, quoted by the IAFF
Fatigue was the reason. Recruitment and retention was the justification that carried a county commission. If you are building a case internally, that is worth knowing, because a safety argument and a staffing argument go to different budgets.
IAFF, Feeling sleep deprived? Help is on the horizon~40%
of fire fighters in a national sample had at least one sleep disorder: insomnia, shift work disorder, or sleep apnea
Barger et al., 2015, Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine, via IAFF →197
fire fighters tracked with wearables in a Yale study finding that sleep interruption differed by apparatus assignment
Mike Binney, West Metro Local 1309, via IAFF →If you run a hospital
Nursing is the one vertical with a current, traceable turnover cost. NSI Nursing Solutions surveys acute care hospitals annually. Their 2026 report covers 527 hospitals across forty states, 965,886 healthcare workers and 262,405 registered nurses.
$60,090
hospitals’ average reported cost of turnover for one staff RN
17.6%
national RN turnover. 14.6% at hospitals counting only full and part-time separations
$295,000
per percentage point of RN turnover, per year, at the average hospital. Modelled, not measured
Three things to know before you repeat these. NSI is a nurse recruitment and staffing firm, not a neutral research body, and the same document contains a sales pitch; the figure is the industry standard and it is a vendor’s. The $60,090 is self-reported by hospitals, and NSI notes that only 46.1% of respondents track the metric at all. And the $295,000 is arithmetic on top of that average, not an independently measured number.
NSI National Health Care Retention & RN Staffing Report, 2026 editionFor policing and fire, we have no cost figure and will not invent one. The six-figure cost-per-officer number in wide circulation traces back to an uncited assertion in a 2016 opinion post. The Police Executive Research Forum’s own workforce reporting contains no per-officer replacement cost at all. If someone quotes you one, ask them for the study.
For trucking, the American Trucking Associations last published truckload turnover at 92% annualised for fleets over $30m revenue, and that was Q4 2020. ATA has since published a correction warning that the metric measures drivers moving between carriers, not leaving the industry. It is a carrier-level churn number and should only be used as one.
Fatigue programmes usually fail at distribution, not at content. A PDF in an intranet folder and an app nobody installs both end at the same place.
It runs in a browser. No app store, no MDM profile, no device enrolment, no IT ticket. Workers open a link on the phone they already carry, including personal phones you do not manage.
The schedule is calculated on the worker's own device. No account, no sign-up, no roster upload, nothing transmitted to us. There is no data processing agreement to negotiate because there is no data.
The methodology page lists all eight rules the calculator applies, the research behind each, and the three constants that are our judgement rather than the literature's. Those three are flagged in amber rather than buried.
The engine is property-tested on every change across every start hour, shift lengths from four to twenty-four hours, all roster types, all chronotypes, and commutes up to three hours. That test caught a real defect before it shipped.
The pilot converts into this, seat pricing published rather than gated behind a sales call the way every other vendor in this category runs it. At 100 workers on the Department tier the annual cost is $1,200, against a calculated exposure near $100,000. You can do that division without us on the phone.
What a seat buys
No admin dashboard, no compliance reporting, no hours logged. Nothing about a worker reaches us, which is also why there is nothing to show you about them.
Team
$18
per seat / year
10 to 49 seats
Department
$12
per seat / year
50 to 249 seats
Site
$8
per seat / year
250 to 999 seats
1,000 seats or more, or a roster that does not fit these shapes: dlomonaco2008@gmail.com. No trial on these tiers, because a purchase order is not a countdown.
Some of these oblige you to do something. Most do not, and we would rather say which is which than let you assume.
Binding
Class I railroads, Amtrak and commuter operators must build and submit a Fatigue Risk Management Program covering scheduling practices and consecutive off-duty hours, review it annually, and pass FRA audit. Effective July 2022.
Binding
11-hour driving limit inside a 14-hour window after 10 hours off, ELD-enforced. FMCSA is currently piloting Flexible Sleeper Berth and Split Duty Period, which is where split sleep starts to matter.
Binding
Eleven consecutive hours rest per 24, a 48-hour average week, night workers averaging no more than 8 hours per 24, and a free health assessment for night workers before assignment and at intervals.
Binding
HSE is explicit that meeting the Working Time Regulations alone is not enough. Employers must risk-assess fatigue, hold a policy limiting hours and shift-swapping, monitor hours actually worked, and consult staff on shift design.
Guidance only
There is no OSHA fatigue standard. The page recommends education and fatigue management programmes. The NIOSH nurse work-hour training it links to is a resource, not required training.
ShiftDawn does not make you compliant with any of these. It is not a compliance control, it does not produce your programme documentation, and it does not record hours worked. It is one thing an individual worker can use. Anyone selling you compliance from a sleep tool is overselling it.
If a vendor hands you a saving percentage for a fatigue tool, ask which trial produced it. The honest answer in this category is usually that none did.
Want a conversation before a card comes out, or need an invoice or a PO? Tell us who you are and we will reach out.
Or email directly: dlomonaco2008@gmail.com