The struggle is real in the smart home market. TBF Starling is handling the situation better than most other companies.
Starling Home Hub is no longer available for purchase.
Since 2019, Starling has been proud to make the smart home experience more enjoyable for tens of thousands of Google Nest and Apple users.
Unfortunately, the rapidly rising costs of doing business for small US-based product companies like us (most significantly, tariffs the US government charges us to obtain the components we need to build our product) means that it's no longer possible for us to manufacture and sell Starling Home Hub and break even on our costs. We're very sorry for the disappointment this may cause to those looking to purchase.
We will continue to provide technical support and security/bug fix updates for our existing customers, along with the Starling Protect service, as long as we can, and we are aiming to maintain enough stock to be able to honor product warranties for existing customers.
We are very grateful for your support and business over the past 6 years. We are busy thinking about 'the next big thing', but until then, it's 'au revoir' for now.
I never heard from them until now. That was their problem. If people don't know about your product, you can't build up enough of a base to be able to get economy of scale.
They made a niche product, so that's understandable.
I don't know about that. It is difficult for a small business that makes a niche product to hedge against a dramatic increase in manufacturing costs imposed by a sudden non-market driven economic change.
Their product isn't the sort that would ever sell tens of thousands of units a year. Yet, it remains essential for those who need it.
From the get-go, this was a niche market (folks invested in both Google and HomeKit) and then an even smaller chunk of that group -- folks who thought "It sure would be nice if I could get all these things integrated in one place or the other".
I always admired Starling because they avoided pushing a subscription model.
Their margins were always razor-thin, so it's sad when these tariffs smoke the little guys like Starling while all the fat-cats get insider breaks that end-around those hits.
Unfortunately, a lot of small companies who relied on inexpensive parts and ingredients from China, India and other countries are struggling to survive in the current economic climate. I hope Hubitat stocked up on enough parts and finished products before the tariffs went into effect. I expect it might be a while before we see new models, however.
Maybe we’d all be fitter, happier and more productive if multinational, mega corporations like Samsung and Google were the only makers of smart home hubs and other IoT gear.
Besides all of the other responses you got, Starling was unique in that it was more of a hobby rather than someone's full livelihood. The owner used to be the maintainer of the Nest Homebridge plug-in before going out on his own. He had already made his money elsewhere and created Starling to fill this very tiny niche.
That's the key thing from the message. The owners of Starling were just trying to break even and provide a unique device for folks. As a current user of Starling, this sucks. As someone who uses Starling to bring in Nest cams, doorbell, and thermostats into Apple Home, that hub is awesome for what it does. There is no need to spin up Homebridge or Home Assistant to do it.
I really need Apple to get faster at creating devices. This would probably be my last forum post if I removed the Nest Hubs Maxes from our house as my wife would murder me. They are really amazing picture frames of our kids that do also satisfy her needs for music and timers.
Since I had not heard of Starling before, I have no idea what the cost of the product was. I have the feeling I missed out on something that was special.
No Nest products here. I am currently using a KONOz thermostat and prior to that a Zen Zigbee Edition thermostat. I hope the Starling device was local and not cloud based so that those who have it can keep using it.
Maybe once things settle down, this can be brought back to the market if there is sufficient demand for it. Lacking that, it would be nice if Hubitat's engineers could coordinate with them to bring some sort of integration that can accomplish the same purposes.
Starling has a fully fleshed out API (Starling Developer Connect - API Reference) that would allow for an integration to be developed. It wouldn't help those without a Starling, but those of us who are users would be able to integrate. It also relies on connections to Google's cloud, which goes against Hubitat's philosophy.
It also allowed me to utilize Homekit's geofence and manually flip Google Home into Away mode. It really is a shame that this is happening for those of us with feet in both ecosystems.
