Manufacturers MUST do better.

When will enough be enough?

Yesterday, Ecobee emailed customers who own their early smart thermostats to let them know these products will soon become dumb. Owners of the EMS and Smart products, circa 2008, will find Cloud support is ending, meaning these customers just rented their "smart" thermostat and were given a free non-connected unit as a thank you.

While it would be nice for companies to build the cost of lifetime Cloud support into the pricing of products, that's not going to help when companies go out of business, when software dependencies make legacy support impossible, or help when Internet outages cause disconnects.

It certainly doesn't offer a solution that guarantees a customer's privacy. For many companies, your data is the most lucrative product they sell. And sell. And sell. Nobody wakes up one day and decides that a few unreliable Cloud features are an equitable return in the recurring revenue your thermostat manufacturer earns selling data about you to utilities, HVAC manufacturers, and market research companies.

For customers who used a Cloud API to connect their thermostat to third party platforms like Home Assistant, who relied on importing weather data to help adjust their HVAC operations, or who used ecobee's web portal for system monitor, you've provided all of the value that the manufacturer feels you can provide unless and until you buy a new and improved thermostat.

Enough.

Manufacturers are cheating their customers UNLESS they provide local API options for their smart products. This allows customers to maintain control when the Internet or the manufacturer's "Cloud" goes down. After all, Cloud just means "somebody else's computer." The open source community has hundreds of thousands of developers contributing to dozens of viable smart home projects of all scales and sizes. Having full local control via API access means that if your manufacturer goes out of business tomorrow or decides to stop supporting the device, you still own the product that you PAID for, instead of renting it.

It's what we all deserve. Demand it from your manufacturers. Better yet, vote with your wallet and only buy products from manufacturers who embrace this philosophy. They ARE out there and don't "take the ball and go home."

.