When I moved in 8 years ago, our laundry service accepted coins or cards. There was a nice box on the wall where you swiped your card, and then you could activa

When I moved in 8 years ago, our laundry service accepted coins or cards. There was a nice box on the wall where you swiped your card, and then you could activate up to four machines at a time, which was great, because I usually ran three loads at once. They also had a fantastic web-based machine monitor page, which was accessible by anyone from anywhere, with no auth required. Then they "upgraded" and every machine got a little bluetoothy card reader dongle on it and a QR code, and they "upgraded" the box on the wall so that it stopped accepting cards. So that's fine, I guess, but it was a pain in the ass to start 3 machines at once, because now I needed to run my card 3 separate times, and hope that the readers were all working OK. There was also a mobile app, but the Android Lollipop tablet I had never worked with the app. You needed to activate both WiFi and BT (and it would force those on) but it still didn't work, despite my valiant efforts to contact their Support idiots. They also shut down the good monitoring page, and the only way to monitor machines was to pay for a load and use the app only. That sucked. A major use case for monitoring was to see who was using machines already, before I lugged everything downstairs! So I got a new Android 10 phone and the app worked okay. I didn't really use the app. Then I noticed that the laundry room was really going downhill. Machines went out of order and weren't fixed. The same with pipes and such. Seeing the hand writing on the wall, I began to outsource to a wash'n'fold service, which has worked great. Then a few months ago, landlady announced that we were switching laundry services, so that was all swept away and new machines were installed. There is a new app. The little box on the wall now sells reloadable cards, too. And you can pick those up at the leasing office. I sort of used the app just to test it. Obviously, there's no world-readable monitoring page on the web. Thankfully, I think the machines are still accepting quarters. But I'm still going with my outsourced hassle-free laundry.