I signed up for the 2 dollar A month introductory offer. Good for a year. I use it daily for determining when Electricity prices are high which then shuts down the large load devices.
If they keep that option for 2Iāll keep it forever! But at 10 a month....Iād be looking for another option.
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I get the frustration, but the stuff about how IFTTT is doing this out of greed is silly. Like all of these 'free' SaaS companies, their real business model is to come up with a service that Google will buy before they run out of other people's money. This step in the process is inevitable.
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We do this at the refinery to determine when we should generate our own power or to use the grid. Most states have a website that has this data readily available. Here in Texas Ercot.com is the one we use. We just strip out the data and push it into our opc historian. The operators can then read the data into their dcs to do with as they want. There's nothing preventing the average Joe/Jane from doing the same thing without having to depend on IFTTT.
This. What a ridiculous premise for a rant on ācorporate greedā when presumably no one has any clue what their balance sheet looks like.
Did they overvalue their new plan? Absolutely, IMO, so I wonāt be paying for it. But not everything has to be an outrage.
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To be honest, you are right, not quite corporate greed, but I think the jumping the gun and not giving much warning, not to mention the crazy cost (yes, I know you can pick $1.99/mo) just seems kinda greedy, as they didn't put much effort into this step. So perhaps not greedy, just not well sited.
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It kinda needs to be real time and something that can trigger ā off ācommands on my large electricity devices like ACs and pool pumps.
Griddy allows people to buy at wholesale price from the grid. In general I pay on average less than 8 cents a KWh with the delivery charge included but the wholesale price varies...and updates every 5 mins
Most of the day Iām around 2c. In the early morning and afternoon when people are cooking breakfast / dinner itās usually 4 or 5 cents. But if there is no wind or a high demand that the plants were not prepared for It can really spike. Just last week there was a few hours where the price was between 80c per KWH and over a dollar. Iāve even see it max out at 9.99 a kWh. So for anyone who cannot control the large use devices they are in for a shock.
Iāve been using ifttt for well over a year and as soon as the price spikes over 6c, ifttt ( which is already connected Gruddy ) sends a command to Hubitat to turn off the ACs.
I finally have it set up to turn back on when the price spike is over too.
It wouldnāt take long for me to eat up 2 dollars a month if I had to rely on the Griddy text message to alert me to manually open my dashboard to shut off devices.
So Iām good with 2 a month.
Cheers.
Mac
Might not even be corporate.
Many tech firms come out of regular entrepreneurs.
Nothing wrong with a free introductory offer to gauge interest then set a price that the public will pay..thats just business.
I'm willing to pay the 2 a month for a year and in that time i would hope that every IFTTTuser here email them and express an opinion over their pricing.
personally i'd love to see them offer a tiered pricing scheme
3 for free
5 to 7 applets for that $2 a month they just offered
10 applets for $5 a month
unlimited for the $10...as they have now.
People have different price points and i can say that 10 is way too much for what i use it for. It's convenience...not necessity.
But i'd be willing to bet they will get more users with a tiered structure as many fell similar to me. Nice to have but not worth 10 bucks
Cheers
Mac
Even if they were raising rates just to make more money though - who cares? Business are in business to make money. If they could get customers to pay a 90000% markup then they probably should.
The customers will decide if they are willing to pay or not. Supply and demand works exactly as designed for non-essential goods and services. IFTTT is definitely non-essential.
People use "corporate greed" as a dirty phrase. I don't see it that way (at least for non-essential goods) - if people pay it, then it is simply smart business. If people would pay more and the business doesn't charge it, then their shareholders/investors should be kicking their arses.
But I digress. Views on capitalism aren't that relevant to the discussion I suppose. 
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Bingo. They're not a charity. They're not in this for the "good of the smart home community." They're in it to make money for their investors. Whether or not that happens is another story. Frankly, they had a great model. They got tons of big names to support their platform, in many cases they're the only official way to integrate, and even when unofficial integrations exist, IFTTT is usually the only "non-polling" method. They built a tremendous user base of not just smart home users mind you, I know plenty of people who use them for business automations and other conveniences. They basically made themselves a integral part of many people's lives... then said "ok, we think we provide enough value for you to pay for it!" It's brilliant! For me, I jumped ship. But I suspect that for people like myself who jump ship, there are 2-3 that are going to pay, even if begrudgingly. If so, they'll have a nice windfall.
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I don't use IFTTT any more, so have little vested interest.
That said, I expect they will come to their senses and settle on a lower more reasonable price once all of the backlash ends.
Also seems very disingenuous to be outraged at IFTTT when the product you bought that had "works with IFTTT" listed on the box stops supporting it or wants to charge you for the privilege. Not IFTTT's fault there at all not even remotely...
As a consumer I chose a long time ago not to use IFTTT so while feeling somewhat vindicated I am bummed out for a lot of people who might not have known better.. or were misled.
"Cloud" services are not bad in and of themselves.. but you have to be careful how you incorporate them, set your expectations accordingly and maybe have a good plan "B".
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The challenge is there are just some things out there where there is no (good) local option. I wanted a sleep sensor. I tried searching everywhere and there just aren't any local options, so I went with Withings which is cloud based. Same thing with pet feeders, I just can't find a local option.
I know there are some who will say "build your own!" but not all of us want to spend hours upon hours putting together custom hardware that works 80% of the time and isn't nearly as well tested as somethings like a Withings Sleep Pad that probably had $5mm of R&D go into its design. So we get stuck with cloud solutions 
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Yeah I totally get that.. but Home Automation (like computing in general) is a lot harder and more complicated than the folks selling this stuff to us would have us believe. I'm not sure there is an easy answer here unfortunately...
Yup, completely agree. Even when it came to the Withings pad, wasn't like it just worked out of the box... I had to write a custom integration for it!
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Well, my answer to that is - I don't have one. 
I too would like a sleep sensor, but I don't want a cloud one, so I don't have one. Simple as that.
If people aren't willing to say NO, then they will keep making cloud devices.
I'm not saying that you, or anyone else, are wrong for buying anything. Just sharing my thought process.
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But this logic is flawed. Youāre implying that by not buying cloud devices it will lead vendors to make local devices, as though thatās the only other option. But there is a third option, I believe it will likely lead them to make no devices. So to me, not buying it, and therefore not being able to meet my needs, is cutting off my nose to spite my face.
That said, I get your point. I just donāt think not buying devices will really get the desired outcome.
I would certainly prefer to phase out IFTTT completely, instead using Hubitat for things that integrate directly, and Alexa routines for things that it can do that Hubitat can't. Surprisingly, Alexa can't control Blink cameras (from a routine), and I don't know of any other way to do it since Blink does not have a published API except the one they developed for IFTTT.
So here's where it gets interesting. Applets that Hubitat publishes don't count towards the three. We can hope that Hubitat puts out a bunch of new applets. Of particular value would be to publish multiples of each one where the applet only handles one of many instances. The current Hubitat applet to arm/disarm Blink on mode change is limited to one mode and one Blink zone.
Another thing that I found interesting is that applets that other users publish also don't count towards the limit, and do you even have to have a paid account to publish applets? What's to keep some kind soul from publishing a potful of applets that they share with others of like interests?
The multiple account hack sort of works, but the limitation is that the services can only be connected to one account (I think). So, for example, I can't have two IFTTT accounts that have applets to communicate with a Roomba under the same Roomba account.
Paying $1.99/month to not have to think about this for a while is probably worth it, but I have grown weary of subscription services. Just enough already. Yeah, I know it is a great business model that works for those selling them. I'm just tired of keeping up with subscribing to a bunch of things no matter how cheap they are. So optimizing the free account is just another technical challenge.
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Yeah good point, what would stop say a group of people on here to all group up and share the cost to effectively make a repository of applets on request that free users can copy.
Fair enough. No devices is a legitimate third possibility.
You're right that sometimes cloud is the only option if it is something you want/need. It isn't as clear cut as I was portraying it.
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