Quiet hours + auto-response

Protect your evenings without ghosting clients. How quiet hours work, and what the auto-reply says.

Cradled lets you set hours when your phone shouldn't buzz, and automatically tells clients who message during that window that you'll get back to them. You stay reachable for actual emergencies; you don't get woken up by a "quick question."

Where to set them

Account → On-call settings. Quiet hours and the auto-response message live together in that one section.

Set a start time and end time. The default is 10:00 pm to 7:00 am, interpreted in the time zone shown in your on-call settings. Quiet hours apply every day — there's no per-day schedule.

What happens when a client messages during quiet hours

  1. The message lands in your inbox normally — nothing is dropped or hidden.
  2. Push notifications are suppressed on your phone. The message is waiting when you next open the app.
  3. An auto-response is sent back to the client, letting them know it's outside your hours.

The default auto-response reads:

"I'm in quiet hours and will respond in the morning. If you're in active labor, tap the Labor button so I get a critical alert."

You can edit this text in the same On-call settings section.

The labor-mode exception

If a client is in active labor mode, quiet hours don't apply — Critical Alerts break through and no auto-response is sent. That's the point of labor mode: it overrides your usual boundaries when it matters. This is why the default auto-reply tells clients to tap the Labor button if they're actually in labor.

How often the auto-response sends

The auto-response is throttled to at most once per hour per conversation — not once for the whole night. If a client sends several messages across a long quiet-hours window, they may receive an occasional reminder rather than a reply to every message, but they won't get one for every single text.

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