Wink to start charging $4.99 a month to control your devices UNBELIEVABLE

To preface this rant I have long abandoned wink, well everyone should know why. Wink has decided that starting on May 13th all users have to subscribe to there paid service or your hub will no longer connect and work with their servers your voice assistant routines will stop working and you will be left in the cold. This is utterly ridiculous wink has a set of balls on them to want what little users they have left, to pay for there crappy service. They cant communicate with anyone about the state of their company and their future plans up until now, But they can do a shameful money grab. I'm ranting so that if you know anyone that may still have there crappy hub, To get rid of it and let them go swiftly into the night. GOOD RIDDANCE.

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You beat me to posting! Yea, just saw this email in my spam folder (I'm sure many users will miss this as well) and given the timetable of only a week (or else!) people will be caught off guard. I expect many more Wink refugees on Hubitat as I'm already seeing posts on Reddit where people are jumping ship. $5 is not really a lot, but without a plan forward, I don't know why people would pay. Too bad, Wink worked well a few years ago and their staff was always very friendly and helpful. I should have sold my hubs when I could have!

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Wow...

They should have done this long ago, (and not 7 days or else!) especially after several days long service interruptions this year because someone couldn't keep certificates current.

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Yes. Wink could never get their Phillips Hue integration sorted. Sometimes delays more than minutes. They quietly reduced their event logs to same day making it almost useless for troubleshooting. Recent outages. Challenges with Amazon Echo/Alexa. It goes on and on. 1 week notice for jumping their free to run platform to $60/year reeks of desperation and I doubt it will save them.

I'm also disappointed that Hubitat immediately hiked their price from $99 to $129 just now. I had $99 in my shopping cart trying to purchase the platform. Now I"m going to wait with another alternative until this platform smooths out some of their remaining rough edges. While I get why Hubitat may be doing this immediate hike, the move is opportunistic and it leaves a bad taste in our mouths for those of us just having been burned by a different freemium model.

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Wink founder Will i am, more link Will i was, or Will i ain't.

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I think Hubitat was under-priced at $99. It's still a good deal for what you get. Better they raise the price now than worry about financial trouble later.

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Hmm. Wink rent must be due on May 13th. While this sucks for existing Wink users and the one week notice is a douche move, the writing has been on the wall for a very long time that Wink was in a flaming death spiral. Will.i.am is a self professed entrepreneur who has zero notion of how to build/run/grow a tech company and is either too stubborn or too stupid (I'm betting on the latter) to realize as much. I imagine that the end goal is to keep the company afloat until someone buys them. This likelihood is even more laughable than I.am's "Buttons", "Puls", or the "foto sosho".

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No, it was not under-priced at $99 and, unless you're in some kind of home automation bind, it is over-priced at $129.

Hubitat knew exactly what they were getting into when they bought into the SmartHome hardware space.

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Tim yeah I feel ya, when I did have wink my wife liked it cause it was dead simple for her. I'm just upset because this comes out of left field to people that still may have their hub, $5 isn't much but I wouldn't pay it to them. If the HE team came out to the community and asked us to contribute $5 monthly I would have no problem doing it because they have never left we without use of my system. I gave my wink hub to my sister she has had nothing but connection issues since I gave it to her, taking 35 miniute drives over to her house only to realize winks system was down so yep you guessed it I just purchased another HE hub for her. Worked out for the best in the end wink is a dead system it is a shame though because when it worked it just worked

Amazing! I abandoned both Lightify and Wink for Hubitat about a week ago and haven't looked back.

Lightify giving a one year notice lit the fuse, but Wink and a their week notice is not only a disgrace, but probably their swan-song.

(Now I wonder if my Wink Relays on HE will have fits?)

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Make sure you can VPN into her network so you can remotely manage. :grin:

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To be clear, $99 was a long-standing sale price. It has occasionally been cheaper than that. But the list price is higher than $99.

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I think hubitat will be fine.they don’t have to do to much being 99% local and having user development.

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I guess this is to make up for the lost revenue of not having wink hubs for sale for most of the last two years and no statements as to why or if they are going out of business. I jumped ship 6 months ago because of the long term hardware shortage lack of any improvements in the past 3 years of use. Glad I did, hubitat can do so much more.

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@terryibert-hubitat It’s $30 more. Meh. You won’t care or even remember in a year or two. I switched from Wink late last year and I’ve been really happy with HE and I think you will too. Takes some extra work to get going and the UI May not be as polished but the capabilities with HE vs Wink are not even in the same ballpark.

We don’t know why the price of HE went up so we? Maybe we shouldn’t speculate that it’s limited to a money grab.

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Yes, $99 was more reasonable for Hubitat. To put it in perspective, Smarthings 3 can be bought for $59 on Amazon right now, which is less than half of what Hubitat is asking. Additionally, those who stuck with Wink probably are not going to generate the demand bump for Hubitat, jacking their price 30%. Remaining Wink customers in the market may not be the type to go full technical with Hubitat either due to lack of ability, time available to dedicate to sort this out, or just plain laziness. $99 was the threshold for me to roll-up my sleeves to go more technical w/ Hubitat and live with having to have an Ethernet connection and more basic UI. With ST3, I can play around with webCORE, and later, if the cloud is irritating me beyond what I've been accustomed to all of these years, I can re-evaluate and port-over then. Perhaps the Hubitat UI will be better.

I would like to get a better sense of how Hubitat's long-term revenue prospects will be. Perhaps someone can shed some more light on this view? It costs money to maintain a platform, even if there is little to no cost on operation for the hosting component. There is still the need for security patches, maintaining/serving up 3rd party integration, etc. Looking at Hubitat's terms of service, I'm not clear how independent one may really be in the advent that the company eventually runs into trouble.

Wink's long-term business model never made sense, and they are not alone.

And they can deal with frequent cloud outages, slowness, 2 separate apps where not some things only work in the old and some only work in the new.. A developer hostile environment..

Nah.. You get what you pay for..

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I nearly bought Hubitat at $79 a few weeks ago when Wink was having Echo integration issues. I held off when I realized Hubitat doesn’t have wifi. I plan to use an old airport express as a bridge so I can keep the Hubitat in an out of the way cabinet. What’s concerning me now though; I’m all for local, but it can still be controlled across country, right?

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To gain access to the setup pages and tweak, you’ll need a VPN setup on your router, otherwise you’ll need to set up dashboards to turn lights on/off remotely

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