![]() Despite having the silver ring fall off and having to glue it back on, it’s been a decent sprinkler controller that provided remote access. I’m not sure that the rain monitor part worked, and the app has had issues connecting to the server, but it kept my sprinkler schedule up and let me access it remotely when I needed to. I purchased this device in 2016 for $166. Without Nest Aware, you still have what you paid for, which is a Live camera. It adds between 5 to 30 day video history, depending on your package. So how do they make money? Nest Aware is an optional subscription package that supplements the live capability of the devices. If someone rings my doorbell, I get an alert on my phone that tells me someone is at the door. Out of the box, I get devices that record the area I’ve installed them in. I just recently picked up a Nest Outdoor Camera and Nest Doorbell. When an alarm is tripped, if you’re not paying for the service, your phone is the only thing that gets an alert. You can still monitor everything using your phone, and you can still arm your home like you normally would. Not paying for this does not remove any functionality that they advertise on the box. So how do they make money? If you pay Samsung, they will professionally monitor your home using a service called ADT Professional Monitoring Service. This is a lot of data passed back and forth between your home and Samsung’s servers. You can set up Rooms, Scenes, and many other things to allow you to continue to make your home smarter. You get an app that lets you monitor and control these devices from anywhere that you have internet, so long as your home also has internet. When you purchase the device, you get a hub that can connect to Z-Wave, Zigbee, and other WiFi enabled devices. If you’ve read any article on my site, you’ve seen that the SmartThings hub is the center of my smart home. For a company that had put out an innovative smart sprinkler controller, they had a hard time coming up with ways to monetize it long term? Let’s look at some examples of companies that charge you long term, if you want them to. My frustration is that this is the lazy way out. What can we actually do? Pay, or lose access. For those that already bought in, features that we already paid for are being taken away. My frustration is that this is retro-active. My frustration isn’t the $2/month ($17.99/year) fee. In this case, the company can decide to start charging a fee for something that was normally bundled with my original purchase price, and I have no recourse. We can get comfortable using them and when the server owners decide they no longer want to support, they can just pull the plug and we are left without any recourse. This is a big concern whenever we purchase devices that are controlled using someone else’s servers (or what people call, The Cloud). Why? According to the FAQ that was in the email, they say: Why is Skydrop now needing to charge a monthly fee? The very reason to have a smart controller is now being taken away. Reading through the email, the folks at Skydrop are essentially saying that they can no longer afford to let me use the app to control my sprinkler controller. ![]() The email proceeded to tell me, very professionally, that I now must pay a monthly fee for what I’ve already paid for when purchasing my controller. The title was “Introducing Skydrop Plus”. A few days ago, I received an email from Skydrop, my smart sprinkler controller, that I almost glossed over.
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