The main issue I have (besides giving up control and data to some corporate entity) is the longevity of said service. I bought into the HE ecosystem because I want to treat my setup like an integrated and (mostly) permanent fixture of my house - something that in of itself could just run without too much intervention other than periodic maintenance/battery replacements. Will I be able to use the service as-is in 5 years? 10 years?
I agree (I definitely would not buy it if the radio backups were local/free). And that is their decision as a company. Users can buy into it, or not - but it is Hubitat's decision in the end how to offer the service.
User's should feel free to lobby their opinion, though, of course.
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Well, I don't see those two things as mutually exclusive.
I think there are some that legitimately would prefer the backups to be in the cloud automatically, so they don't have to do it themselves, or worry about where they are stored.
But I agree that the backups can be perfectly safe/secure locally as well with some work. 
Not as often as I'd like. Phone companies seem to manage both contract and PAYG but not most other types of company.
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That is the ultimate question. My android phone is either all to Google or piecemeal backup's and makes moving to another phone difficult. And do you trust their back to restore with so many different types and versions of their OS in place. And since they aren't charging for it what is there terms on restore. Actually if you read it, it's best effort, no guarantee of functionality of the restore process or that apps will work as before.
With a user initiated backup and restore is the vendor supporting that process and under what conditions? MS deprecated the legacy backup format for a new one that is more "cloud" friendly. Look at all the folks that wouldn't be able to restore backups if they didn't provide backward compatibility to restore old while having to force them to move to their newer solution.
Thinking about this under what conditions can a class action be taken if you have a local backup and lose functionality because something happened with the restore? And say that backup wasn't vendor but user? We live in a very litigious society.
Yes it's great to have choices, service providers are looking for revenue and reducing risks for litigation, and providing well defined service levels. that make the consumer feel comfortable. We as technology folks don't think like the average consumers.
LOL. Won't waste my time watching that one either. His videos are worse than click bait.
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I belive in tiers and options. Perhaps they could give us a Z-wave/zigbee cloud backup for $100 a year and then perhaps they enable a setting on our device that lets us save z-wave/zigbee local without cloud that costs, say $30/year. then lets say device protection that would cost us $150 a year that lets us do all of this.
IDK. I always like a little option, though i do admit i mull over all of them all the time, but I like the option, for some people who rather save some $$$, but costs nothing on their cloud servers. just an idea.
Blue Iris works for blink now?
TinyCam does so that's good enough for me 
Also (more helpfully 
), this...
That seems unlikely...
Iām not exactly an expert in blue iris, but Blinkās system is pretty closed and Iām not sure how it would integrate with BI. But as @Angus_M pointed out, thereās a new community integration in an alpha stage of development.
I'm a bit torn here. I'm all for supporting a service that adds value to me especially when they're introducing new features... and in theory, this paid tier should improve the performance.
But they're starting this off by taking away features from existing users, so what's to say they won't take features away again later... maybe introduce a higher level tier and move some of the features I use into that tier.
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I understand your concern, and it could possibly happen. However, the existing users were non-paying customers. I think it's less likely they would take features away from paying customers, but of course it's possible.
I'm more concerned with the long term viability of IFTTT. Is it profitable now? Will it continue to be profitable? If not, it will go away at some point in the future.
I know most people hate subscriptions. But in my opinion, without the ongoing income subscriptions provide, most of these internet/software service businesses cannot survive long term.
In any case, I think $1.99 per month is reasonable for the convenience IFTTT offers me. At that price point it won't break the bank. If the price is raised in the future, or the service shuts down, I'll just deal with that if and when it happens.
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I got an email tonight saying I could pick my monthly price now, and they would honor it forever. Still wont do it, It isn't reliable enough for me to pay for it, it was barely reliable enough to use for free.
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I signed up for a free account ages ago, when I first bought my first Smart Life outlet and had never heard of SmartThings or Hubitat. But never used it as it seems a bit pointless given that I switched to Hubitat to remove my dependency on the cloud.
I agree, if it was rock solid even 90% of the time I would pay 1.99 but it is NOT reliable for me so I will not be subscribing.
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So last week I signed up for the $1.99 plan, thinking it would be fun to play around with and try to integrate my Blink and Arlo Cameras with Hubitat. After all, I thought, $1.99 is not exactly going to break the bank. Wouldn't hurt to try it, right?
Today was my first day actually setting up the IFTTT applets. For some reason my applets were not executing. I went to the status page and found this:
Now I remember why I chose Hubitat with it's local processing!
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It's right up there with the weekly Samsung outages emails. Shows that IFTTT doesn't have the best security management processes if they are letting SSL certs expire.
Since this all started, I converted all of my Tuya devices to Tasmota, and deleted all of my IFTTT linked 'things' and applets. I'm out!
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