[Resolved] Dispute About Hub Protect Plan - Resolved

Why Hubitat Elevation
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Hello,

I am writing this in order to share my opinion, ask for others opinions, and hopefully get a better response from Hubitat. I had a C7 hub for years and am a paid subscriber to the Hub Protect Plan which includes:

Extended Warranty

Hub Protect extends your Hubitat Elevation hub warranty for the duration of your subscription, subject to our Terms of Service. Should your hub fail due to a hardware defect during your subscription period, Hubitat will send you a replacement hub. Customer pays shipping.

If you receive a warranty replacement hub via Hub Protect, your Hub Protect subscription will be transferred to the new hub. In all other cases, your Hub Protect subscription is non-transferable and will remain with the original hub. If you migrate your database from a protected hub to a non-protected hub, you may add a new Hub Protect subscription to that hub to use cloud backups and extend the warranty. Hub Protect subscription renewal may be cancelled any time and your subscription will remain active until the end of the subscription period.

A few weeks ago my C7 had a DB failure that would continue to fail after soft reset and restore. This continued to happen to such an extent that I lost the ability to even perform a soft reset (it would reset and reboot right into an error screen without even attempting the restore yet. I realize this may or may not be a hardware failure pending further evaluation, but decided it was time to go for a C8 Pro. I asked support via email if I would be able to get any credit toward the new Hub. They told me that yes, they could take $90 off due to my subscription. Their response times were very slow and my whole smart home was inoperable, so I ordered a C8 Pro directly from Hubitat and messaged support asking to be credited the $90. I offered to return my C7. After a week with no response from them, I asked if anyone was still out there. This is the reply:

Hi there,

Unfortunately we cannot credit your account for an order placed on hubitat.com or Amazon. However, we could offer you two free years of our popular bundle service. Not only does it extend the warranty of your hub for the life of the plan, should that hub fail again, but with Remote Admin service you would also be able to access your hub from anywhere in the world with an internet connection.

Regards,

Customer Support Services
Hubitat Inc.

Email: support@hubitat.com

I do not need the upgraded service for two years as I already have a VPN for remote access for free, and this in my opinion is just another hole for an attacker to potentially get in.

Am I being unreasonable here? The technical support on this community from members of the Hubitat team has been FANTASTIC. This is the first time that I feel truly let down by the company.

Thanks for reading my rant!

EDIT: Support did come through and honor their warranty.

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I am sorry to hear about your less than favorable experience. I looked into your case and it was an unfortunate chain of events.

Your original case was submitted on Apr 22 at 9:47 am, indicating that you have had multiple database corruption incidents, and that you'd like to upgrade your C-7 to a C-8 Pro.

A database corruption incident is not indicative of a hardware malfunction, but since your hub was already offline, and we couldn't confirm if you were dealing with a hardware malfunction, our support team responded to your case on Apr 23 at 12:00 pm, offering you the upgrade option. Four minutes later you have informed us that you've purchased a C-8 Pro hub, already.

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Thank you for your reply bobbyD. It is true that things moved quickly at that time, but as soon as I mentioned that I purchased the C-8 Pro, approximately a week went by with no response from support. I fail to understand why they were willing to give me a credit toward a new hub, but suddenly cannot do it because I was not patient enough to wait for their reply. I could understand if I ordered the hub from a different company, but it was direct from Hubitat.

Maybe you could explain why this is such a problem on your end? I understand that the correct chain of events would be to wait for a reply and have you guys send out a new hub however you normally do it, but I have some mission critical stuff running here which is why I was paying for the hub protect plan in the first place.

Thanks

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Because there are two different inventories and two different process flows for fulfilling the orders. For example, the replacement hubs ship without the retail packaging and the additional accessories that come in the retail box.

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If you'd like, we can send you a replacement C-7, right away, with expedited shipping and wave the shipping cost to speed up the process, if you still believe that we failed to honor the Hub Protect service.

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I can understand your frustration but unless I’m missing something, you went ahead and ordered a new hub assuming they would give you a credit on that hub? But that was an invalid assumption.

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I am very glad that you are a Hub Protect subscriber. Can you imagine how long would have taken you to restore the "mission critical stuff " if you didn't have a cloud backup to get you back online as fast as possible?

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To me, this sounds like an excuse - I am not sure why it would be so hard to transfer money from one side to another. I do realize that I likely did not follow your policy so you can certainly tell me to get lost. Just wanted to be reasonable here. If no other option I would appreciate a replacement C7, I can give it to my parents and set up a few automations that they want.

I mean you no disrespect and I thank you for your very quick replies. Have a nice day.

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Yes to be honest with you, I paid for it because I would hate to have to setup my entire Z-wave / Zigbee mesh again. I do wish Hubitat would allow local backups of the radio data, but this would harm your subscription model and a business needs to make money.

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You are correct.

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It seems like they were willing to go above and beyond what was required according to the Hub Protect terms by granting your request for a discount on a new hub.

Hub Protect would’ve included a replacement C7 only.

You’re making more assumptions that it was even technically possible for them to offer local backups of z-wave and zigbee radio databases, and they decided not to for financial reasons.

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I agree with you that their offer was above and beyond. I am unhappy that it was retracted for a reason that I consider to be semantic - I suppose that is where we respectfully disagree. If they are willing to send me a replacement C7 then I concede that they are holding up their end even if it is not what they had me expecting.

As far as your insinuation that I am making assumptions because radio data can only be backed up to the cloud - that seems absurd to me. You're telling me they can only target their servers with the backup files, but somehow storing them locally is not possible? Again, respectfully disagree.

As far as I am concerned I have made my point, bobbyD made his, and if they honor the Hub Protect Plan then I cannot really complain. Someone changed my thread title too - which seems rude, but honestly if they want to replace the C7 then the dispute is resolved in my opinion even if I don't love it. Thanks.

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I’m not insinuating it, I am explicitly stating it. And I apologize if it came off as rude since that wasn’t my intent.

I am not on the staff nor do I work in IT. So the details of why a local backup of zigbee and z-wave radio database were not easily accomplished are beyond my comprehension.

I believe it had something to do with zigbee, not z-wave. It is possible to read more about how this came about in other threads.

You can disagree, but your opinion does not appear to be based in any specific facts or knowledge you’ve referenced. It appears to be based on assumptions.

That was me too, and again my intent wasn’t to be rude, so I’m sorry that’s how it came across.

Your original thread title said that support was failing to honor the Hub Protect plan. That is simply not an accurate summary of the situation, as you seem to acknowledge.

If you believe the thread’s original title was more accurate than what I changed it to, you can edit the title yourself to change it back.

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When I have the time, I would like to research that. It appears that Home Assistant can do a Zigbee radio backup locally, so I most certainly reject any excuses being made here unless I am incorrect about HA being able to do it. You mentioned that I have no reference so here is one:

Easily Backup & Migrate Your Zigbee Network!.

Maybe they have an excuse for why Hubitat cannot do this but Home Assistant can? Still does not add up for me. Let me be clear about one thing - I do not fault them if they decided to make radio backups subscription based in order to make some needed profit. At the same time, in my opinion it would be a great reason to move to Home Assistant when my whole rationale for using Hubitat was to avoid monthly fees.

As far as your change of the thread title, when someone confirms that they are sending me a replacement C7 honoring their warranty, then I would agree with your change. Until then, the warranty has still not been honored.

Again, I am not trying to disrespect anyone here and I think I should leave things at that.

If I do get a replacement C7 sent to me, I will gladly update this thread to say that the warranty was honored, despite the messy journey there.

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I wish you the best of luck in getting your warranty request fulfilled. Personally, I have no doubt that they will honor the terms of the Hub Protect service.

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An unhappy customer is not the reputation of our Support Services, nor an acceptable outcome for us. We obviously failed to set the correct expectations on how the Hub Protect service works, when you first reached out to us inquiring about the upgrade discount, and that is an opportunity for us to improve. Please check your email for the details on when the C-7 hub will be delivered. It is already on its way.

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Thank you bobbyD.

As far as I am concerned - The warranty was honored and the issue is resolved.

I apologize for "jumping the gun" and not waiting longer for support. It was just difficult to wait with everything that I have the Hubitat controlling.

You guys really do make a fantastic product and I have enjoyed using and further developing it over the years in my implementation.

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@bobbyD @acr2001

This is the first time I've seen a database failure be attributed to a hardware failure. What exactly happened here? Did the eMMC fail? And if it did, why would that selectively show up as database corruption?

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Curious about this myself. There was a lot of odd behavior. I had attempted a soft reset and restore over a dozen times. Sometimes it would run for a few hours before corrupting again, sometimes the soft reset would leave me with a brand new corrupt DB. I had tried different power supplies to try and rule that out. Really unsure to be honest with you. The Z-wave radio behaved oddly from the beginning and I had done a lot of additional metering to try and reduce how often it would crash, requiring a power cycle (not just reboot).

The C8 Pro that I purchased and restored the same backup onto has been running flawlessly thus far.

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as @bobbyD said above...

So I'm guessing they don't know and just decided to honor the warranty anyway not knowing what was actually going on, this is actually above and beyond the warranty if you ask me, not many companies would have done this.

This means that maybe the original C7 is still good and could be recoverable?

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