The HE staff don't have to do anything I say, I run my own business from home selling a service so I can say what i have been advised by business advisers. Hence the reason why i said I didn't want to be out of line.
There is a lot of stuff going on in the world and a lot of companies are using this moment to shit on people (while we have 18% nationwide unemployment I should add), understanding that some may not like what Wink is doing and trying to help them by reducing the cost of your alternative product is good public relations.
If I say hey you should switch to HE it's a top quality company they may say ok, But then if HE says we understand and we are going to give Wink users a discount it's goodwill that will pass on by those Wink users saying hey HE is a standup company.
Marktheknife, HE can do what ever they want with their company that's why i said it in my earlier post, just like this whole covid-19 mess the public will remember the companies that helped and the ones that were dicks, plain and simple.
Yes, but what do hubitat get out of it? Nothing and worse than nothing they will get a load of new customers who have no idea what they are doing and have been used to a system that looked amazing and did nothing. Now there on a system that looks ok but can do crazy things! They are also likely to use more cloud products which costs more money.
So with all the nuances of a different platform and miss understandings of how things worked on the other systems the 1st place they go is to support because that's what they are used to (for no fault of their own), things get bogged down and then they rant at how crappy HE is, only doing hubitat a dis justice.
Now if they are lucky, the noobys will send a ticket and come to the community aswell. Here we all will happily help out our new found friends and get them over the steep differences. Then by the time the staff get though the new thousands of emails they have had and get to answer the same question they been asked 700 times that day; it doesn't matter because the customer is already happy and has started elevating their environment. But that has cost them time and money that they need to be using elsewhere.
The fact is HE is more than worth its normal price tag and $30 is not going to break one persons bank but it will go a long way to help support HE and the extra costs for the new influx of customers (wherever they come from). BTW I paid a bucket load more money for my hub as I got it as soon as they released it to the UK, with that and the extra taxes it was more than double what you lot have been paying in the US. Was it a good price then.... YES . Is it a even better price now..... YES! Take it for what it is, the current market value, covering all the hidden costs no one ever thinks about.
Yes but your also asking someone to dive into a platform that has no real app, when most other platforms have an app, and don't use the they can make a dashboard argument it's not an app. I think HE is worth it I said as much, But for someone to leave a platform that has a real app and come to a platform that has no app and has to do a work around and then pay more is a stretch, that's all i'm saying.
That's not quite as I see it. No one is being forced to use this platform. It is by choice, and up to individual purchasers/customers to be cognizant of what they're buying into .....
Where does this keep coming from? There is a load of people keep saying this.
I have a app and it is very real and works perfectly . It give me notifications and presence updates (which is really all I use it for). It also has access to devices that I have allowed it to see via dashboards (with a smartly upgrade if you haven't already it's worth a look if you want to give you dashboards a clean fresh look. https://community.hubitat.com/t/release-smartly-v1-06-custom-icons-thermostat-re-design-custom-dashboard-link-label-and-icons/36681 ) I can use these devices while I'm at home on my LAN or via the cloud when I'm out and about. Now does the app allow you to manage, add new devices, edit program and generally mess around with you hub, no and quite right too. It's much better to only allow this to happen on your LAN and by only me in my house.
Borris it's not an app that is a dashboard not an app people like a dedicated app like the wink app or the vera app or the smartthings app or even the homeseer app.
It is very much a app it's on the app store and I downloaded as a app.
I can only speak for smartthings but there app was crap for everyone in the house because it was messy and you could break things with it. My wife hated it.
Somebody is going to say this so it might as well be me... Home Automation doesn't need an app to turn things on. It's not automated if you need the app for control.
It really just seems sad to me. This is clearly a last desperate attempt to keep the lights on. It was just never the market success they needed it to be for hardware sales to sufficiently subsidize the service expenses, and as it started downhill it seems they could never turn it around.
I traveled a lot for my business before the toilet paper virus, it's nice that so many don't need an app, But for me an app is damn useful I often have to do things from an app when i'm not around. So the people that find apps useless as you say that's fine but some of us need a real app not another damn webpage opening up, an that's all the damn dashboards are, are webpages.
. It give me notifications and presence updates (which is really all I use it for). It also has access to devices that I have allowed it to see via dashboards (with a smartly upgrade 
if you haven't already it's worth a look if you want to give you dashboards a clean fresh look. 
