Warning: Ranty Post ahead
If any manufacturers of IoT hardware are reading this, please STOP offering a free tier for your products and services, as unless you can maintain that free tier for the lifetime of the product it will be your undoing.
I’m not talking about free trial periods here, I’m talking the free tiers that are often bundled with products and software seemingly for the lifetime of the product, such as cloud storage, printer ink etc. It seems to have become a growing trend that companies either get greedy or desperate and decide to wriggle out of the free offering through some loop hole in the terms and conditions, that they know no one reads anyway!
I was first bitten by this, with a company called Y-cam, who offered free rolling cloud storage for offsite video clips captured by their security cameras. This was an ideal setup, pay for the camera knowing that any captured clips would be safe offsite in the public cloud. For reasons unknown they decided to remove the free part, and changed to a subscription model. There was a lot of internet chatter at the time how wrong this was, and customers took it upon themselves to respond to this by leaving shocking 1-star reviews on places like Amazon. I personally was not prepared to pay for an enforced subscription, and stopped using the cameras, and moved to a different system out of principle, probably at a higher cost of paying for the subscription. So where is Y-cam now, well they don’t exist anymore, they were brought out by a company called ERA, so clearly they were in trouble hence the move to a priced subscription.
So why am I writing this, well its happening again, all over the place, not just in small start up companies, but large multi nationals, recent examples that have affected me personally are IFTTT, HP printers and even Google.
A few months ago IFTTT announced that if you wanted more than 3 automations you need to upgrade to their pro account, at the time I was over this level. So I investigated running my own home based automation system, using Home Assistant, which I am now happily using for my arming and disarming of my home security cameras, which I wrote about previously and looking to use for even more home automations. From reading other posts on places like reddit, it seems like a lot of people, like me will look for alternatives to IFTTT.
Last week I had an email from Hewlett Packard saying they would be stopping the free tier for their instant ink program which I had been happiliy using for a number of years. I didn’t always stick to the 15 pages a month, especially during homeschooling, but I knew in advance how much I would pay if I went over that amount. Now suddenly to remove this tier will be a blow to the company, the money for the subscription is not the problem, again its the principle. I like many more people in a similar situation will be looking for a new printer, and it certainly won’t be a HP printer.
Yesterday I see the news in my RSS feed that even Google is going to start making the photos uploaded to Google Photos count towards the allocated space in Google Drive, pushing people to pay a subscription for more storage through Google One. There was already a rumor that some of the features in Google Photos, such as the colour pop, would only be available to Google One subscribers. Yet again I will be voting with my feet, and will incorporate my own solution, yes probably at higher cost, but it will mean I am not funding greedy or desperate corporations, who certainly in Google’s case make enough money out of my data as it is.
So any existing companies or people with IoT startup ideas reading this please stop offering the free tiers if they can’t be sustained, be open and honest with your potential customers and tell them upfront that your product has a subscription model with it, then people know what they are getting into from the start, and less likely to jump ship to a competing product. I’m sure they are not worried about the loss of my single subscription, but we are in a connected age, where information and ideas freely flow, and some clever people who create workarounds and alternatives share them with a collective group, hopefully with an impact into profit margins and customer base.