Customizable Dashboard Pricing

But you have a Vera… This is about Ezlo…

thanks for reporting. its fixed now.

I briefly used ImperiHome as well as a few other applications to control Vera over the past 10+ years. Nobody comes close to the UI presented in the current Vera app. It’s clean and sophisticated whereas the other “customizable” interfaces look cheap and cartoonish and certainly not a wall mountable UI to display in a home.

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Is the dashboard model you posted, available?

If so, where can I get it

Thanks
Dom

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I am of the mindset of paying for maintenance and support or annual subscription or none, but the latter doesn’t brick my system. So that being said, paying for M&S would mean that support is of superior quality, and maintenance updates are moving the software forward in richness and feature sets. The attributes I don’t mind paying for. I have been working for major sw corps in an executive capacities and the above is how we generate great revenues and satisfied customers.

Very basic premise.

P

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Not yet. It will be available after we launched the dashboard.

I think he meant Rigpapas dashboard…:smiley:

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lol…sorry missed that completely :slight_smile:

I don’t mind paying, but I hope there is discount of 2 months free if i pay for one year in advance and not on monthly basis (for example 2 years in advance should have more discount).

Regarding the dashboard, we are having one now and I think you guys working on improvements, so how the one you are talking about will be different? And how we can be sure it will be updated constantly and feature requests will be Implemented?

For example i have been in touch with one of you dealers in our region in late 2018 early 2019, he was saying vera will get major updates in near future (around 3 months or so)!

I will pay the fee if:
we have a dashboard can be used on a hanged tablet on the wall.
live streaming of some ip cctv.
doorbird full integration (that i can answer the ringer from the app itself).
konnected integration (was on road map for future support).

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A little off topic but i am using the Imperihome interface as described on the folllowing page:

http://www.domotique-info.fr/2015/05/personnalisation-interface-imperihome/

Looks really nice has a high WAF, and you can make it as clean as you want. Just my two cents :slight_smile:

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A great user interface is definitely important but I will take function over fashion.

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A good dashboard should be part of the product itself.
This will also be “the face” and attract new customers.

So when this is build properly, most users will not need a customizable dashboard. For those who do want to tinker more and adjust a dashboard completely to their own needs and wishes, a paid solution is not unreasonable.

I myself will not be paying a subscription fee at all and will look elsewhere.
A one and lifetime payment, after a tryout periode, I will consider. The amount for me will be determined by the possibilities and quality.

A well build and very flexible dashboard is acceptable up to €10 as a one-time purchase. A poorly developed dashboard isn’t worth more than 2 cents to me.

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I think a customizable dashboard that really works well with Vera would be great, and is much needed. I’d suggest considering bundling this with your other subscriptions and just doing one premium subscription service vs. lots of nicking and diming on lots of different subscription options that are a la carte. Maybe just a premium offering for $20/mo that includes the camera storage, security service, custom dashboard, etc. etc. I’d personally have no issue paying a couple bucks a month for a solid well supported dashboard though. I’ve paid for lots of others as one-time, all to seem them go relatively unsupported over time.

exactly its the problem of business models. We want to make sure the business model is the right business model so that service could be provided continually.

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melih,

trademarks and copyrights only apply within a particular industry. The vera name is used by this file security company and by this home automation company (you guys) Nobody is going to confuse the two of them.

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melih,

I recognize the trend today in software to go to subscription model. But you are completely missing the point on the idea of tying a home automation product like the Ezlo hub to a subscription.

The issue isn’t whether or not it’s worth $2.95 a month or whatever. The issue is how long are you going to be charging that $2.95

Imagine for example that a $2.95 a month sub model is successful in 2020. By 2030, ten years from now, you have 200,000 users out there who have spent many hundreds of dollars on various Ezlo sensors not to mention each one of those people has spent hundreds of hours testing various scenarios and drilled and taped and wired all that stuff into their homes.

But, it’s 10 years in the future. CPUs are now available that have fantastic amounts of processing power for pennies that weren’t available today. You decide OK we are going to toss out all of our Ezlo designs using 10 year old parts and build all new stuff. Easier to program for us, does lots more stuff for the customers and it will make us competitive with others that are doing fancy stuff.

However, you want to get those 200,000 users to buy that stuff. So the incentive to just tell everyone “OK we are no longer offering the $2.95 a month sub” is insanely high. You might not even be working for the company and your successor just comes in greedy for money.

They know if they cut off the 200,000 people that 50% of them will say “screw you” and go to a competitor. The rest will grumble but move to the new platform. That solves 2 problems. First now ezlo doesn’t have to put in development time and money to the old hardware. Second, ezlo gets a lot of money from the people who have brand loyalty.

When I first got interested in home automation I knew nothing and I read every review I could trying to find out information about the products. And EVERYONE was touting their subscription models, including Vera. However of all the ones out there, (this was before hubituate was a thing BTW) Vera was the ONLY one who (in a footnote, but it DID exist) stated that if they decided to STOP offering their cloud server that the Vera hub would still be able to be logged in locally.

Today, I have a vacation house 100 miles away, full of Zwave gear that manages the heat, door access, burglar alarm. sprinkler, etc.

I have a Ubuntu box at the house and a dedicated full time VPN from my main house to the vacation house that is up 24x7

If your cloud servers disappear I can Xterm to the Ubuntu box and run Firefox and manage the vera controller locally.

I was on your Atom beta program and I was interested to try out the Atom with my sensors. When I got the Atom I went through…drumroll…12 individual 5v USB power supplies before finding one that would actually power the stupid thing. With every other one while those supplies had no problems charging cell phones, within 10 seconds of the Atom being plugged into them the Atom shut down - or the power supply shut down - or something. The only one that actually worked was a P.O.S. Apple 1amp 5v cell charger. By the time I ran across that the beta period was over. So I ended up concluding the atom hardware wasn’t worth my time. Maybe one day I will mess with it.

There was a story back in 2015 about Grand Rapids school system that used a 30 year old Commodore AMiga to control their heating system. The machine was still in operation and had been in operation for 30 years. The electric furnace in my vacation home was installed in 1971 when the home was built and it’s still working fine. That is 49 years, going on 50. My house is also filled with light switches that are also 50 years old. (I have pulled and replaced the electrical outlets because you cannot reasonably expect a spring to maintain tension for 30 years and be safe in an outlet)

I drive a car made in 2003 that has a 17 year old engine computer that is still running. I run servers on APC UPSes that are 15 years old.

With all due respect I question whether a software guy like yourself has what it takes to develop a successful home automation platform. You people think that something 4 years old is “antique” Well I have friends who live in a house with a 60 year old round Honeywell mercury thermostat controlling their (newer) furnace.

Home control is very much like industrial process control. You buy this stuff and spend a lot of time installing it and then you want it to run for decades or until the million dollar concrete kiln or whatever it’s controlling is finally remodeled. If you are going to try doing a sub product nobody is going to buy it unless you put in writing that you are going to support it for x number of years, That is what Microsoft finally had to do with their software products.

Good luck!

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Thanks for that @TedM. Within legal sense trademarks belonging to different categories you are right. However in this day and age, unless one owns the domain name to their brand, investing on that brand will only drive traffic to the owner of the domain name. The company doesn’t own vera domain name…that’s the main point I was making.

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I don’t know who you are referring to, but you are making my points exactly!
I also agree…it should be set and forget and future proof…System should be scale able without replacing it…and upgrade able…Last think I want to change hardware every 5 years…leave it running as long as possible!
So we are fully aligned it seems!

Yes I get it. Kind of silly but that is the world. Thanks for reading my post. I’ve been in this business for a long time now. Please push your marking people to commit to a produce lifecycle like Cisco and Microsoft do. It’s much more professional and after all it really only affects the hubs.

Now you asked at the beginning what people would do going forward and I neglected to tell you this.

So here is what I will do for myself personally. I will continue to use the Vera Plus that I have. If you release “ezlo” firmware for it then as long as I don’t have to pay a sub fee to you I will upgrade to it. On the day you ask me for a subscription fee I will decline and allow my account on your cloud servers to expire. Once it expires I will then see if I can still login and manage my Vera Plus. If I can then I’ll do nothing other than continue to use it. Otherwise if I can’t then I’ll try to dig up pre-subscription-required firmware and back-rev to it, and if I can’t then I toss it in the electronics recycler.

So, my advice to you is this. On the day that you build that very last firmware build that is ever going to be usable locally, without subscription, on either the Plus or the Atom, make sure you leave a setting or a flag in it that allows the user to turn off the ability for it to login to your cloud servers. Because if you do that, then me, and many thousands of other Vera users will simply flip the switch and ignore what the Cloud servers are doing and continue using our Veras. You won’t have to spend money on us and we won’t be irritated at having to figure out some workaround. Otherwise, if your bean counters manage to push you into forcing subscriptions, then those thousands of users will enrich your competitors. Look at it this way - by not forcing us to scrap our hubs, you are denying hundreds of thousands of dollars going to your competitors and it costs you nothing. And from time to time some of us may get tired of local-only access and bite the bullet and pay for the sub. What’s not to like?? :slight_smile:

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Ah yes but I have had long experience in the dd-wrt community. dd-wrt is amazing. The very latest code they release today still has a build tree that allows it to produce firmware that runs on the antique Linksys wrt-54gs. It’s amazing they are still supporting it. Of course, by the time the CPU of that antique device finishes executing all the additional opcodes in the current firmware and actually moves a packet from one interface to another the total throughput of today’s code is like 10% of code that was compiled 10 years ago, but who’s counting - it STILL RUNS!! :wink:

Seriously, the day will come that the embedded CPU chip in the Plus will just not have the oomph to run current firmware.

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