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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 g

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.
TeMPOraL 6y ago
> unlike businesses where labor time is expensive, many consumers don't think of their free time as particularly valuable. On a tangent, I think it's important to understand "why" is that. Not because most people are stupid, or they don't know the concept of opportunity costs, as popular explanations go. It's because for most individuals, time is illiquid. You can't just turn every 10 minutes you save on some chore into 1/6 of your hourly rate. So, for most people, that $2/month is a pure loss, even if it saves more than 10 minutes a month, so it needs to be (or at least feel) truly worth it.
- themacguffinman 6y ago
  I agree. Outside of a business context, most individuals aren't hurting for time in the first place. They usually don't even notice anything less than huge time savings or splashy benefits. It's no wonder consumer software, especially productivity software, is mostly free nowadays even when they cost a lot to develop. It's actually pretty hard for consumers to justify paying for any software. The consumer software developers that succeed usually shift the software cost way from the consumer somehow, either by creatively re-arranging prices (eg. baking the price into bundled hardware) or charging someone else (eg. ads). IFTTT has a tough gig and I wish them the best.

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.

TeMPOraL 6y ago

> unlike businesses where labor time is expensive, many consumers don't think of their free time as particularly valuable. On a tangent, I think it's important to understand "why" is that. Not because most people are stupid, or they don't know the concept of opportunity costs, as popular explanations go. It's because for most individuals, time is illiquid. You can't just turn every 10 minutes you save on some chore into 1/6 of your hourly rate. So, for most people, that $2/month is a pure loss, even if it saves more than 10 minutes a month, so it needs to be (or at least feel) truly worth it.

themacguffinman 6y ago
I agree. Outside of a business context, most individuals aren't hurting for time in the first place. They usually don't even notice anything less than huge time savings or splashy benefits. It's no wonder consumer software, especially productivity software, is mostly free nowadays even when they cost a lot to develop. It's actually pretty hard for consumers to justify paying for any software. The consumer software developers that succeed usually shift the software cost way from the consumer somehow, either by creatively re-arranging prices (eg. baking the price into bundled hardware) or charging someone else (eg. ads). IFTTT has a tough gig and I wish them the best.