Intentionally chose an open ecosystem for the smart relays in my house, now they crippled the app adding a $4 subscription
Intentionally chose an open ecosystem for the smart relays in my house, now they crippled the app adding a $4 subscription
If you don't pay a subscription you can't see the history of use, it's limited to the latest 5 events. When I bought the ten devices (=I paid 150 euro for the hardware), it was 100 events
Well i sure wouldn't call that an OPEN ecosystem
The ecosystem is open. The app isn't.
If the ecosystem is truly open, anyone can make an app for it and charge for it if they want.
you may be interested in the open-source "Home Assistant". it's a free home automation hub thingy that supports practically every brand and protocol out there, including Shelly. if you're technical enough to set it up, free yourself from proprietary apps!
A correct and helpful answer. HA is phenomenal, although some report the learning curve is steep - it's totally worth it.
I use it with lots of different vendors and it consolidates and coordinates everything between everything else.
Thirded. Home assistant is amazing and getting more beginner friendly every release.
Download VirtualBox and set it up on your computer to try it out for free! No investment required.
I feel like I'm going to get a lot of use out of this.
This Shelly thing appears to be the typical cloud SaaS platform. What does exactly make it open?
At the moment of purchase one year ago they had an open API and a webserver on each relay to use them without apps (they still have it... for now?). I could just type the relay IP address on my browser and control it without proprietary apps.
I loved this openness so much that I put them everywhere in my house. Then this surprise update came today on my phone....
My brother in Christ, if you have Shelly why don’t you just run HomeAssistant which controls them locally? https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/shelly/
Why would you ever hand some server on the internet control of your own fucking home?!
Join us !homeassistant
That’s not an open ecosystem, that’s just a yet to be closed and monetized system.
I see, typical trap from this fuckers. You can use this as an opportunity to learn to flash firmwares to things and to not trust proprietary software, specially nothing in the cloud for your home automation
Reflash them with ESPHome
Didn't realize that was a thing. I'll have to look into that.
If they can cripple it like that, it was never really open.
Looks like Shelly. If so, if you set up home assistant and get Shelly added do you get all the features you want? I would think so.
Yes it's possible but it adds friction, ha is much more cumbersome to use (in my house I only have Shelly devices)
HA has gotten a lot better in the last year if you haven't used it in a while. I honestly don't feel it's cumbersome. Gone are the days of needing to use YAML code.
HomeAssistant is not cumbersome in the slightest. The only issue is that you have to set it up yourself, so if you do it poorly then it’s cumbersome. People post beautiful dashboards and automation blueprints daily multiple places around the internet.
Honestly the most mildly infuriating thing is that you have this whole bunch of devices tightly integrated with an easy local solution and you decided to use their cloud app. You never use the cloud app! It’s always a trap. I don’t even use the Nabu Casa cloud stuff from HA.
Whether or not the price is right is another discussion, but I will point out that they're not charging for you to see the events. Like you said, there's a web server and API for that. They're charging you for them to store the history and serve it up on demand, which does have ongoing costs and I understand not accepting a one-time purchase for.
If you want history, hook into the API with Home Assistant or Grafana or something and store it yourself. It's either that or pay them to store it. Infrastructure that stores and serves up the history doesn't come from nowhere, and an ongoing cost for an ongoing service kinda makes sense.
I think 100 dollars is more than enough money to cover a few bytes of text storage. It's not like they are storing megabytes of tracking meta data. And if they are that's even more reason to provide the service for free.
Aren't Shellys like $20? Super cheap devices.
Everyone recommend HomeAssistant and it’s great. An alternative that’s easier to implement if you’re using Apple HomeKit (on HomePod or Apple TV) is HomeBridge. It’s super easy to setup and becomes a bridge to make anything compatible HomeKit.
I use Shelly and Home Assistant. Set up takes 5-10 minutes. Mine have been plugged up and running for 2 years with no flaws.
Like if storing 100 timestamps in their servers actually costs them like that...
100 timestamps in Unix epoch is something like 400 bytes and can be stored locally on the microcontroller without needing for the cloud
Might want to double that to a whopping 800 bytes if you don't want issues starting from the year 2038.
Prices in kapitalist society are not about the cost but about what people are willing to pay
Mate, I flash my Shellys with esphome and just use them locally in Home Assistant. Or, you could flash them with Tasmota and use the built-in webserver on each device to configure automations.
Cloud-dependent =/= open
Just like how BMW and Tesla made basic car features a subscription, soon phone and hardware companies will make some features a subscription as well. People need to stop being sheep and stop buying products from such companies, but the way it is now, it's too high an expectation.
All for-profit companies eventually enshittify.
I flashed my Shelly’s with the Homekit firmware from the link below and manage them via the HomeKit integration in HomeAssistant.
Why do that when there is a direct Shelly integration in HomeAssistant?
One less integration to manage and It doesn’t rely on the cloud to work.
In one of the issue they said he got hired by Shelly and the project then is discontinued
I flashed mine over 12 months ago and haven’t had any issues since. I had noticed there hadn’t been any updates but didn’t realise he’d stopped working on it.
Home Assistant or bust.
"Smart" homes. Not even once