Wink has just announced plans to move to a $5 per month paid subscription on May 13th 2020 (yes, just one week from now), and subscriptions are mandatory.
Decline to pay to subscribe before then and you will lose access to devices already in the Wink app as well as all your automatons.
This is the risk when using home automation platforms based on cloud services without some kind of core offline and local-access functionality.
Spend your $60 a year on purchasing replacement devices (with local control). I don’t expect wink will be around much longer.
Yes they must be desperate not to give a 3-month notice. I think that samsonevickis answer was best:
“Exactly, this gym is about to go out of business, so they announce a price hike, BUT hey, just for you today sign up for a FULL year and its only $50, thats a huge $10 saving. Plus new features yet TBD.”
No new features or added value with the new subscription. Just threat; Pay or you loose access now.
In contrast, I do not think Samsung SmartThings as their closest competition will require a monthly fee in the future as Samsung makes a lot of money on all their other connected products which are also compatible with the SmartThings ecosystem. Samsung is also moving more local control to the SmartThings Hub.
Samsung has stated that all new appliances announced after 2020 will be “smart devices” connected to the internet and interoperability via your Samsung account. I am sure this is also why Samsung is migrating all customers from SmartThings account to Samsung account.
I think that it is safe that the is a huge market demand today for IoT / internet-connected products, but most people are still not willing to pay a monthly fee for each and every service.
Regardless, I am still pretty sure that Samsung do collects and sell usage data (however that data would have to be anonymized first before they sell it, so I do not believe that they sell personal data, at least not on purpose as that is illegal in many countries, especially in the European Union with EU GDPR laws).
Went with GoControl CECOMINOD016164 HUSBZB-1 USB Hub and haven’t look back…nothing beats the response time of local verses the cloud! Lights come on in HA now just as quick as flicking the light switches!
I was a former Wink user but gave up on Wink last fall, glad I did. My guess is this is a desperate move to keep going while they look for someone to buy them, else I suspect bankruptcy isn’t far behind them!
Only thing is I was going to rely Wink for my Quirky GE AC unit this summer, but not paying $5 just to control my AC…guess that has officially become an expense dumb AC unit.
Of course, all these cloud services are what is so wrong with IoT right now…countless stories of providers bricking their IoT stuff over the last year!
Piece of advice to IoT manufactures, build a hub that used HA and offer the hub for local IoT device support to your customers. For customers okay with cloud that’s fine, but if manufactures provided both options customer loyalty won’t be a problem!
Discussed also on hackaday https://hackaday.com/2020/05/07/ask-hackaday-wink-hubs-extortion-as-a-service/
You now also get less from it as Wink terminates its partnership with Chamberlain for MyQ integrations