4 ms·

You don't get $2/month of value out of what you're doing? Then why are you doing it at all???

bluetidepro 6y ago
Not OP but feel the same way as OP. Some of it was just fun stuff to setup, and do originally. And since it was unlimited, I did a lot of things that were just fun to do for the heck of it. Once paying actually comes into play, over 90% of the actions I have setup are NOT worth paying for because I hardly ever actually use them in real life. They were just simply fun passive things to set up to show friends/family for fun mainly. Example: Making a smart light flash red every-time President Trump tweeted was just a silly goof to setup to show friends. Not something I'm actually going to pay for. haha
- dheera 6y ago
  > Making a smart light flash red every-time President Trump tweeted was just a silly goof to setup to show friends Just to play devil's advocate, have you ever been introduced to either a job opportunity or investment opportunity via your friends, who see that you're able to build stuff? If so, you could potentially place a monetary value on the benefit you derived from doing that.
  - biotinker 6y ago
    If we're going this route, every time someone builds something like this and shows it to friends, that's a tacit advertisement for IFTTT. IFTTT can also then place a monetary benefit on allowing users to make unlimited things like this.
    - dheera 6y ago
      Sure, almost all consumer products advertise themselves. You could say the same thing about cameras, cars, phones, ...
  - benhurmarcel 6y ago
    This is the most SV tech bubble post I've read this week.
themacguffinman 6y ago
Many consumers will stop using a service if they have to pay any money for it with little regard to how useful the service is to them. These consumer services generally help save free time, but unlike businesses where labor time is expensive, many consumers don't think of their free time as particularly valuable. Especially developers, they'd gladly trade their free time for other benefits like more control or openness like the OP is doing here: > It's just that this was the nudge I needed to move my automations to infrastructure that I have more control over, which has other benefits outside the scope of this article.
- outworlder 6y ago
  > Many consumers will stop using a service if they have to pay any money for it with little regard to how useful the service is to them I don't agree. If the service is free, you can just use it. The moment you have to pull your wallet, you start doing cost benefit analysis. "Do I really need to use this?" The answer is often no, even though some benefit could be potentially worth more than $2. Potentially. Often, it is difficult to calculate a monetary value. Not only that, but this is a case of "I have altered the deal, pray I don't alter it further". Had they started with some limitations in place, and then charged to expand them, this probably wouldn't have caused such backlash. People don't really like things taken away from them, even if they originally paid nothing. They tend to prefer deriving some sort of "benefit" out of a deal. As for developers... I'm another one who ditched IFFT. Not just because they want to charge me, but because they started charging manufacturers a lot too, which caused many of them to drop IFFT integrations (even though these same manufacturers kept many others, like Alexa). Having things stop working, specially if it's related to home automation, can be a bigger hassle than setting them up "properly" in the first place. So now I have Home Assistant and Node Red. With Hass.io, all you have to do is download the image, put on a SD card, stick it into a Raspberry Pi and you have Home Assistant. A couple of clicks and it installs Node Red already integrated and ready to go. Does it cost more than $2? Certainly. In both labor and parts. In return, I can integrate almost all my devices (I'm missing a couple that don't have APIs at all, but they didn't work with IFFT anyway). I can do things that IFFT can't even dream of. I don't have to worry about price increases, EULA changes, keeping payment information up to date, cloud or internet outages. If the Pi goes up in smoke, I can throw it away and move the SD card over (or restore a snapshot). Yes, it did cost a couple of hours of work. But since I had to do something about it anyway, might as well bit the bullet and trade off the time I'd be watching a movie to do this instead. I'd argue that the resulting system is worth way more than $2 a month.
TheRealPomax 6y ago
As the article states: because of inertia. They had things in place, there were some shortcomings but it was free so there was no reason to be too bothered, and there was no reason to really switch away from IFTTT. Now they have that reason, and so they wrote this article.

Not OP but feel the same way as OP. Some of it was just fun stuff to setup, and do originally. And since it was unlimited, I did a lot of things that were just fun to do for the heck of it. Once paying actually comes into play, over 90% of the actions I have setup are NOT worth paying for because I hardly ever actually use them in real life. They were just simply fun passive things to set up to show friends/family for fun mainly. Example: Making a smart light flash red every-time President Trump tweeted was just a silly goof to setup to show friends. Not something I'm actually going to pay for. haha

dheera 6y ago
> Making a smart light flash red every-time President Trump tweeted was just a silly goof to setup to show friends Just to play devil's advocate, have you ever been introduced to either a job opportunity or investment opportunity via your friends, who see that you're able to build stuff? If so, you could potentially place a monetary value on the benefit you derived from doing that.
- biotinker 6y ago
  If we're going this route, every time someone builds something like this and shows it to friends, that's a tacit advertisement for IFTTT. IFTTT can also then place a monetary benefit on allowing users to make unlimited things like this.
  - dheera 6y ago
    Sure, almost all consumer products advertise themselves. You could say the same thing about cameras, cars, phones, ...
- benhurmarcel 6y ago
  This is the most SV tech bubble post I've read this week.

themacguffinman 6y ago

Many consumers will stop using a service if they have to pay any money for it with little regard to how useful the service is to them. These consumer services generally help save free time, but unlike businesses where labor time is expensive, many consumers don't think of their free time as particularly valuable. Especially developers, they'd gladly trade their free time for other benefits like more control or openness like the OP is doing here: > It's just that this was the nudge I needed to move my automations to infrastructure that I have more control over, which has other benefits outside the scope of this article.

outworlder 6y ago
> Many consumers will stop using a service if they have to pay any money for it with little regard to how useful the service is to them I don't agree. If the service is free, you can just use it. The moment you have to pull your wallet, you start doing cost benefit analysis. "Do I really need to use this?" The answer is often no, even though some benefit could be potentially worth more than $2. Potentially. Often, it is difficult to calculate a monetary value. Not only that, but this is a case of "I have altered the deal, pray I don't alter it further". Had they started with some limitations in place, and then charged to expand them, this probably wouldn't have caused such backlash. People don't really like things taken away from them, even if they originally paid nothing. They tend to prefer deriving some sort of "benefit" out of a deal. As for developers... I'm another one who ditched IFFT. Not just because they want to charge me, but because they started charging manufacturers a lot too, which caused many of them to drop IFFT integrations (even though these same manufacturers kept many others, like Alexa). Having things stop working, specially if it's related to home automation, can be a bigger hassle than setting them up "properly" in the first place. So now I have Home Assistant and Node Red. With Hass.io, all you have to do is download the image, put on a SD card, stick it into a Raspberry Pi and you have Home Assistant. A couple of clicks and it installs Node Red already integrated and ready to go. Does it cost more than $2? Certainly. In both labor and parts. In return, I can integrate almost all my devices (I'm missing a couple that don't have APIs at all, but they didn't work with IFFT anyway). I can do things that IFFT can't even dream of. I don't have to worry about price increases, EULA changes, keeping payment information up to date, cloud or internet outages. If the Pi goes up in smoke, I can throw it away and move the SD card over (or restore a snapshot). Yes, it did cost a couple of hours of work. But since I had to do something about it anyway, might as well bit the bullet and trade off the time I'd be watching a movie to do this instead. I'd argue that the resulting system is worth way more than $2 a month.

TheRealPomax 6y ago

As the article states: because of inertia. They had things in place, there were some shortcomings but it was free so there was no reason to be too bothered, and there was no reason to really switch away from IFTTT. Now they have that reason, and so they wrote this article.