I'm not seeing them saying that anywhere. As a matter of fact, check the link in the original post I made that was given to me by their support. Their support said this was sort of their press release. As you can tell, it sort of rubs the wrong way that I didn't receive any emails around this AND then even in their own press release they don't provide a reason around why they are doing this. That should be front and center, but clearly, ecobee is lacking in the "communication" department.
I don't know whether to respect them more for not lying and not providing a reason at all (since I'm willing to bet it is because they want to force people to upgrade) or to respect them less for at least not making something up. I fully expected to read something like, "Our resource-level at this time does not allow for us to continue supporting our older legacy products and as a result these will be phased out."
BUT if I did read something like that, I would get it. If this was strictly about support (and that is how their own support words it) then that is fine. No longer support the old product. That is fairly common in the industry. What I don't find nearly as common is to do what they've done here, that is, turn off services to the device reducing what was once one of the most expensive thermostats on the market to a $20 "dumb" thermostat.
This is actually spot on. Remote control and data storage for the first generation ecobee Smart and EMS thermostats relies on an older API that they decided to retire. Note, that local control at the thermostat will continue to work until the thermostat dies. So, in that sense, it is not rendered dysfunctional or obsolete.
Why are they doing this? I don't think it is for security reasons. Two years ago, Stu Lombard (ecobee's CEO) did an interview that was in one of the HVAC trade magazines I occasionally read. This was right after ecobee's acquisition by Generac. He talked about their first generation products and how ecobee had repeat customers since most of their first generation users had transitioned to newer products. All their products made since 2012 use a different API than their first generation products.
If I had to guess, it was a business decision to stop maintaining servers that support a small number of customers. And this is probably why ecobee offered massively discounted replacements to first generation product owners.
@JPW - if you go this route, the re-wire might be very easy or might be difficult. It all depends on the complexity of your HVAC installation. If you have a standard 1H/1C system, you can get by with the existing 4-conductor cable if the PEK is used. Anything more complex will require new cable to be run with more conductors.
I don't think this is the case. It is a very small number of customers that still use the generation 1 products. Forcing them to upgrade is not going to generate much business revenue.
Webcore graphing built in to hubitat can keep historical data and graph it, or if you really wanna be cool on your dashboards, use influx-db and grafana to record it. But you can graph a couple of years with hubitat's built in tools. Note: You do not actually have to install webcore.
FWIW, what I talked about above doesn't require any Apple devices or other HomeKit setup. I just have my two Ecobee thermostats (and a Ecobee camera they gave me) talking to Home Assistent using HA's HomeKit emulation.
I can understand your frustration but it sounds like they could have had entirely justifiable reasons for making this change.
Something presumably went wrong with their email campaign to notify affected customers and offer other options, since it doesnāt look like they deliberately sprung this on users by surprise.
Have you reached out to ecobee customer support to point out that you did not receive any prior communications and, as a longtime customer, would like to see what they can work out for you rather than you having to abandon Ecobee entirely?
There's a very good article in The Verge from a few months ago about ecobee discontinuing support for its two oldest products.
The author does make the point that supporting a smart home product for 16 years is something of a record in the smart home space. And she points out that these thermostats will continue to function as "dumb" (not connected) programmable thermostats.
She also points out the desirability of having a local API so the product can be controlled via Home Assistant or Hubitat. In some sense, HomeKit support in ecobee's current offerings provides that local control option.
You don't have to switch anything out. The emails they sent out (which I received, BTW Dunno why I said that, I didn't get an email as far as I can tell, I guess I just "heard about it" from staying abreast of tech news) said the thermostat itself will continue to function as a programmable thermostat, you are just losing cloud services. So again. Respectfully, I don't think this is the great swindle you are making it out to be. I DO agree that it sucks, but in the grand scheme of IoT, Ecobee are doing way better than most.
This is the Hubitat forum, right? I thought I was amongst people who didn't want to be hostage to companies providing cloud services. But instead many here are not only defending Ecobee and turning their services off on me, one of their early adopters, but for some of what appear to be the craziest reasons to me.
Many of you are saying this isn't about money and it must be about something else (i.e. security), but you have to be asking yourself at this point (and after I'm told 3 communications were sent out about this (that I never received)) how do we not know definitively why Ecobee did this? That should be front and center and none of us should be left to ask. It is crazy and seems cagey to me. Most companies would at least provide some kind of B$ response. If anyone has found this information in any of the communications Ecobee sent out, please let us know because I still don't know and don't understand why Ecobee has made it a mystery.
Also, many are saying this isn't about money because there are a small number of generation 1 users and Ecobee is too big for that. Isn't that worse? I just looked up Ecobee's valuation and Google says it is at $770 million and as others have pointed out here, they were just bought by Generac and Generac is worth $8.6 billion!! This is no longer a company just trying to make it out there and if their generation 1 users are so small in number, why not help them? I felt good about supporting Ecobee so early on because they were providing the services I was looking for. It was probably the most expensive thermostat on the market at the time, but I was happy to spend it with NO disclosure about them being able to turn off these services at any time. Shouldn't the fact that they obviously have adequate money at this point give them more reason for keeping these services up and running for their most loyal customers that supported them so strongly early on?
So, what have they done instead? They know good and well how their first generation products are designed and those customers are going to have to spend significant dollars to move to anything. I not only have to spend money on a new thermostat, but also the cost of getting it installed, which won't be cheap. And this from a company that is valued in the hundreds of millions and now billions?
Thanks, but mine is a two-stage. My A/C company does great work, but they charge premium prices for it. I seriously doubt they are going to look at this as a super simple job, but I hope they do. We'll see.
The article is good, but I'm in disbelief that no where in it does it explain why Ecobee is turning off the generation 1 devices. We are just left to guess? Like I've said, and its sad to say, but they could at least make something up if they don't want to pass on the truth.
If the cost of maintaining a service used by a small (and diminishing) number of users affects their bottom-line, ecobee or any other company is going turn the lights off.
Supporting an iot device for 16 years is way longer than most companies have done.
BTW, here's what the email looks like (in case you wanted to search your Spam/Trash folders):
I'm curious. Why do you think ecobee needs to provide that information?
Did Google provide that when they turned off any of the IoT products they've killed - like the Revolv hub? Did Samsung explain why they stopped manufacturing SmartThings hubs? Or when they rendered thousands of smart homes "inoperable" by dropping support for Groovy?
The Wink hub, introduced in 2013 came with "lifetime" cloud support. Well, they now require $5.99 a month to use their device, and their app doesn't work on recent versions of Android.
Business decisions are usually made for an economic benefit to the business. And I don't think anyone's going to break that down for end users.
I will add - if you dislike ecobee's decision, it would be prudent not to invest in another ecobee thermostat. Or any other cloud-dependent option.
I'm not asking Ecobee to be a non-profit. I'm asking that they at least make an attempt to be transparent and provide a reason behind their actions. Can you name any one other incident or company you know of that made a strategic change like this with no explanation why? It is weird.
In the IoT space, I can't readily think of any examples where a company has explained a business decision to either drop a product or service. In fact, I can think of additional examples where a service was dropped with no explanation - for instance, Comcast dropping support for Stringify. Staples dropping support for their Connect hub. Lowes stopping support for the Iris hub ...... there's a long list of corporate decisions made without an explanation to end users.
Thanks for those examples. I wasn't aware of those and interesting that they are all in the technology / cloud space. I'm not sure I've seen business conducted in this manner elsewhere, but maybe that's just me. It isn't commonplace is my point.
And yes, I've all but decided not to buy another Ecobee. I know my decision won't impact their bottom-line of hundreds of millions of dollars, but it is the only way I know of to not support poor communication and poor actions on a company's part such as this. It is unfortunate and sort of a "slap in the face" of the years I promoted Ecobee for building such a bullet-proof product. I never really dreamed that the product would outlast the company's desire to provide services for the early adopter customers who put their hard-earned dollars into it, but here we are.
I think you'll find it is very commonplace. I'll give you two examples that still rankle me.
As a kid, I loved Lifebuoy soap. Unilever pulled it out of the American market in 2006, presumably a decision driven by dwindling US sales. But they never told me why
I was a huge fan of Caffrey's Irish Ale. Coors bought Caffrey's in 2001, and stopped the import of Caffrey's Irish Ale into the US. Now this made me really really
The adult in me realizes that it would affect Unilever's bottom-line to provide something for a small number of aging codgers. And their bottom-line also probably drove Coors' decision.
Respectfully, it does sound like you want them to make decisions based off of something other than how they expect their bottom line to be impacted.
There is never āadequateā money from the perspective of for-profit corporations. They do not love their customers or care about them in any meaningful way. They will only ādo a solidā for their customers if they think the negative PR implications of not doing so outweigh the financial impact.
Everyone here feels for you, myself included. Itās a shitty situation to be in. But some of your expectations in this situation donāt seem entirely realisticā¦
My guess (100% speculation on my part) is that the 1 guy left at Ecobee that was supporting the older, first gen devices and cloud services has decided to retire. As a business decision, Ecobee looked at the cost of replacing this resource and continuing to maintain an obsolete (in their minds) platform VS the fallout from simply shutting it down and asking their users to migrate to their newer offerings with a discounted thermostat. They chose the latter as companies want growth for their shareholders. Do I agree with their decision? It does not matter if I do or not. I guess I am not surprised whatsoever as a former user of Lowes Iris (dead), Wink (pretty much dead), and SmartThings (it is dead to me, but actually has bounced back - they even forced their users to replace the original V1 ST Hubs as they chose to no longer support that hardware.)
One thing that is certain - CHANGE. It is inevitable - but can be very frustrating!
Note: I have a pair of Ecobee 3 Lite thermostats that I really like. They replaced a pair of first gen Nest Thermostats. Google broke a lot of Nest users when they shut down the "Works with Nest" API - without any really good reason, other than they wanted everything to be managed in their unified Google Home platform. Even when they made that change, tons of functionality was lost for years!
Good luck with whatever you decide! I hope it all works out in the end.
I thought I was amongst people who didn't want to be hostage to companies providing cloud services. But instead many here are not only defending Ecobee and turning their services off on me, one of their early adopters, but for some of what appear to be the craziest reasons to me.
