MCV, even after your customers asked you repeatedly, you still do not use the official thread which was created to keep the customer base in the loop of what is going on.
It has been years now, with two hardware versions of Vera released, and yet as a company, and product developer, you keep ignoring basic functionality requests from the customer base. What a portion of your core customer base wants and keeps asking from you is :
A stable Vera running UI2 or UI4 with local user accounts, SSL HTTPS internal and external port access, and a simple email server running for notifications on the Vera that has a check box to stop calling MCV.
We, your customers, have asked for this functionality for years. As far as I have read, MCV continues to REMOVE the parts of this capability in UI 4 that we had in UI2. Now we are being forced to move to UI 4. I have seen posts by much smarter linux/drt users than me in which they accomplish this for free with open source GNU stuff. Why have you not done this?
I can only come to one conclusion, you don’t want us to have Vera under our control in a LAN environment at all. You need Vera to be securely accessible only through an MCV portal. I am sure one could argue that we wouldn’t be nearly as secure with a self-signed SSL certificate, but actually, we would.
The original pricing of the Vera seemed to depend on people subscribing to a service along with buying Vera. I remember a tiered system for XX sms messages, etc. It was very generous and a smart marketing move to not charge for the basic access and the charges went away, but I always assumed to be a sustainable, profitable business model you still need that recurring revenue stream. UI4 seems to guarantee that model should you throw the switch. I don’t see a subscription model as nefarious, but I do think that if this is the direction you are headed, you should reconsider the approach.
Why is MCV so sure that taking away local control and accessibility from the device is the correct direction. I would love to see your market research into this, but it seems that the theory must be that the user base for this product really is a mainstream electronics consumer, and that by moving control, maintenance, and access into MCV’s hands and out of the consumer’s, you can create a device that appears to be simple and easy to use while reducing tech support cost.
My narrow experience over the past few years is that a large, vocal portion of your market wants the exact opposite. Your security forum is full of YEARS worh of posts wanting more control of the device, more local capabilities, and less WAN to LAN intrusion via the Vera initiated VPN to MCV. Having a device establish a vpn with a third party (even the trustworthy people of MCV) from within a LAN therefore bypassing most consumer firewalls is not an acceptable risk for even moderately secure networks. Vera is on the inside interface of the router and therefore trusted by default by most consumer routers and software firewalls. The MCV VPN termination could easily be used for near total LAN access on most home networks. While I might trust MCV, there is no way to quantify the risk posed by the VERA device.
In conclusion, if the goal is to move us to a subscription model, tell us. If UI 4 access restrictions lay the groundwork for a subscription model just tell us. If that is the case, please consider the option to buy a license to control our Veras locally. If you aren’t moving Vera back to a subscription, add the functionality we have been asking for over the past few years so that we aren’t dependent upon MCV. I would imagine it would be much cheaper to have a server load decreased with a few thousand less Veras hitting it all of the time. . .