Winks claims seem bogus

I get that Wink's original business plan was... crap. Things didn't quite work as planned. But, the current state of affairs is a sham. And, not a particularly smart one in my opinion. You won't find anyone recommending their products any more. And while the hardware was great according to everything I can find on the subject, the fact remains that most people don't really use a Smart Home to its logical limits anyway.

What seems fishy about their claims however is that they offer no option. No remediation to customers who are willing to take the onus off of Wink.

If the real reason behind the subscription was solely because running a hosted service is expensive, then surely you could eliminate that concern in one of 2 ways. Offer a secondary hardware solution at a fixed price to handle that load locally, or allow users to host their own solution.

Or, better yet, both.

Here is the breakdown. Most people will gripe if you ONLY offer a separate purchase. Despite the fact that most people aren't technically minded enough to build out their own solution. By making it possible to configure the device to talk to another service locally without the need to hit Wink's cloud at all would eliminate the host costs for those clients.

If you could self-host however, all of a sudden, I think most people would no longer see the hardware sales as a money pitch. Even though, realistically, it would continue to be so. And, the majority of users would be likely to take that route. And, given that the Wink Hub itself has CPU and RAM, something as low powered as a Pi-like SBC computer would be handily able to play the part of the server for the average home. Thus, profit.

So why not do this? Well, $5/month is $60/year. And it is PURE cash. Buying a say $100 server which costs $50 to produce is only a one time $50 boost.

$5, BTW, is ludicrous. These home automations aren't consuming massive CPU time in the cloud, or huge storage resources, nor are they gobbling up bandwidth. $5 per user, per month, while it may not seem like such a large cost is absolutely BONKERS compared to the operational costs associated with your usage. Which is probably pennies a month to them.

The cost of that subscription could come FAR down if the only thing they were interested in was offsetting the operational costs. But, that is a sham.