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Smart Home Company Wink Gives Users an Extra Week Before Surprise Subscription Fees Are Required

Winks business model see how many customers we can get rid of in the shortest period of time.
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This is like Nintendo when they added the subscription. We bought the Switch when released and my son got Splatoon 2 which he could play online without a charge. Nintendo introduces the subscription a little later and now has to pay if he wants to play that game online. Pure theft. It is getting to the point with all the subscriptions that we will never own anything.
 
Well, this gave me an extra week to choose a new hub. Looking an hubitat. Anyone have any experience?
 
classic bait/switch.

should be illegal.

Lesson here is that any time some service is "free" it isn't. The company here would have known that hardware sales would not cover cloud ongoings unless hardware sales were exponential. i.e., a pyramid scheme. and like all pyramid schemes when the numbers reach critical mass, they collapse.
 
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"We've heard you say that our original announcement was tone deaf. So, here we are with another tone deaf announcement."
 
zorinlynx said:
One of my requirements for buying any kind of "smart" anything is that it be able to function locally without access to the Internet. A good example of a great ecosystem that works locally is Philips Hue. Hue has cloud functionality, but it's not required for basic operation. Hell, once you program your lights and dimmer switches they will continue to work even without a local network since they use their own protocol to communicate.

So much of the newer "smart" home stuff has 100% of the "smarts" on the company's cloud servers. As a result, not only can they eventually hold you hostage like this if they want, but if your Internet connection is down you suddenly can't do basic things like turn on your lights or adjust your thermostat from a phone on your own local WiFi network.

Sadly it's become very much a "buyer beware" like you said. You need to do your research before investing in an ecosystem, and companies can be really good at hiding the true requirements from you.

HomeKit support is a good sign, as it operates over the local network and you only need the Internet to control things from outside your network (using an Apple TV or always-home iPad as the relay).
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That's because Philips Hue uses the standard Zigbee protocols. Which is good. In addition to working without an internet connection, it's also interoperable with many other Zigbee compatible devices.
 
I am glad I did not buy into that platform. Building my home automation has taken longer, but I am happy that I am control platform independent (Android or iOS works), and not locked into a singular solution or ecosystem for the hubs.

Definitely frustrated for some of my friends that bought into this Wink system though.
 
And this is yet another reason why we need truly decentralized smart home devices.

I can certainly appreciate that cloud hosting is not free, and that the low price of many IoT devices prohibits long-term ongoing cloud support. I truly do understand that problem. What I don't approve of is the "solution": design devices that require your cloud services, then bait-and-switch your customers and force them into paying for a subscription for hardware they've already purchased.

Cloud hosting too expensive? Let consumers handle that. Some will gladly pay for the ease-of-use of using your cloud. Others (like me and I'm sure many others) will either pay for a VPS to host it, or self-host it on their own connection. Amazon, DigitalOcean and the like can offer turnkey solutions. Either way, "the hardware revenue isn't covering cloud costs" sounds pretty ****** when you consider that you've designed a product to require those very cloud services and offer no way for the user to choose to self-host (covering those costs themselves in some fashion).
 
Rychiar said:
I remember when Apples .Mac started charging for email... its's the reason my Apple ID isn't a valid email address...
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Hey same, but I’m having some issues and Apple is trying to force it. I cannot any longer long in on the website to change payment method. Ugh. Have you found anything to make this work? I don’t want to make it the email addres, and I can’t use another email all together.

the end is near I think.....
 
Thanks but no thanks, I still use the Wink version 1, it's been years and I have not seen much change or improvements. At least show people what new features Wink will bring to the table before straight out force charging people for something marketed to be subscription free... it's just terrible marketing and damage brand image and user trust.

Anyways, I'm getting rid of my Wink hub this week and moving to Hubitat.
 
icanhazmac said:
Were they not being paid in the purchase model or is it that they failed to properly price their software and innovate new versions creating upgrade revenue?
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The traditional model has a company invest a lot of time and effort into a product then sell it at a price and hold of major improvements until the next version or even another version down the road. So you have V1 out with V2 and V3 planned already and you mostly get all your month from V1 in the first month then trickle sales until you push out V2. So from this we know that a lot of people bought our product and now we've earned the money and have some money left(usually not a lot). So some or all the developers start working on version 2 and version 3. However, we don't know if v2 and v3 will generate any money as all we have is initial sales values so in turn we look at sliming down the number of developers and QA.

In the subscription model(which is not one size fits all, should not need a subscription for ever app), the company hires developers and they produce a initial version and then marketing works on growing the user base. The user base reports back errors and asks for new features and the developers start on them right away. Nothing is held back and you are always running on the latest version. Continuous development is put into the product with nothing held back and no sudden drastic changes. The program grows more organically and the number of users is the base for success. We no longer have a case where we sold a thousand copies and only a dozen of them buy the next version. Developers lives get much less stressful as a result, deadlines for the most part are no longer tied into some random date that the marketing department needs to hit or the company is at risk of going out of business.

Subscriptions have also for the most part helped to stamp out piracy on more expensive applications like MS Office and Adobe Photoshop which used to be very expensive. I still have my Photoshop 1 to CS6 disks and boxes, these cost a small fortune compared to the $10 a month.

I however would say that one of the better models in play is done by Capture One. You can pay them $20 a month or $400 for a perpetual licence with 12 months of updates.
 
ruka.snow said:
I still have my Photoshop 1 to CS6 disks and boxes, these cost a small fortune compared to the $10 a month.
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Exactly! :)

It's well-known that Photoshop used to cost $700 to purchase. Seven Hundred Dollars! Yikes!

Fortunately you could pay $700 and use that version of Photoshop for the rest of your life without giving Adobe another penny. That's one scenario.

But every two years Adobe would release a new version with new features that cost $250 to upgrade if you're an existing customer.

So let's look at a couple upgrade scenarios:

$700 - years 1 and 2
$250 - years 3 and 4

That's $950 for two versions of Photoshop spanning 4 years... which is $238 per year.

Or you can skip an upgrade and get the next one:

$700 - years 1 thru 4
$250 - years 5 and 6

That's still $950... but you get the features of three versions of Photoshop spanning 6 years... which is $158 per year.

And of course... the longer you wait between upgrades... or if you never upgrade and use the same version forever... it gets even cheaper per year. But I'm just trying to outline some typical scenarios here. I would assume most Photoshop users paid for upgrades at some point.

But in this age of subscription pricing... Photoshop costs $10/month or $120 per year! And you always have the newest version.

Compared to the above scenarios... the subscription only costs $480 to use Photoshop for 4 years or $720 for 6 years. And you'll receive continual updates that entire time. You don't have to wait 2 years between versions to get new features.

The development cycle is much different now than it was a long time ago. Adobe can update Photoshop with new features yearly... or sometimes twice a year. They don't have to wait until the next boxed copy is released.

And let's not forget about the rest of the Adobe suite. Master Collection used to cost $2,600 to start... and $1,800 to upgrade to new versions. So the initial purchase and one upgrade a few years later would total $4,400 for the software. :eek:

But now you can get every Adobe app for just $50/month. That's a lot more manageable in my opinion.

I know some people hate the idea of subscription software... but I support what Adobe is doing. It's the software I choose to use and I will pay for it.

Then again... I run a business. I use Adobe apps to make money. And I can pay for the entire month's Creative Cloud subscription with just a few hours of work.

Photoshop was never meant for casual users anyway. Moms and dads didn't pay $700 for Photoshop or $2,600 for Master Collection.

That's what Photoshop Elements is for. :p
 
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Michael Scrip said:
Fortunately you could pay $700 and use that version of Photoshop for the rest of your life without giving Adobe another penny. That's one scenario.
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You could if you were using it for anything not relating to editing RAW photos. CameraRAW always hit a block and photographers replace cameras every 4 years or so. But in that time you had maybe 2 OS updates that stopped Photoshop from running. I still have my 'lifetime' licences of Photoshop, but I have nothing they'll run on now.
 
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