Wink Abruptly Switches to Subscription
Wink has taken many steps in an effort to keep your Hub’s blue light on, however, long term costs and recent economic events have caused additional strain on our business. Unlike companies that sell user data to offset costs associated with offering free services, we do not. Data privacy is one of Wink’s core values, and we believe that user data should never be sold for marketing or any purpose.
We have a lot of great ideas on how to expand on Wink’s capabilities and satisfy the many requests from our user base. In order to provide for development and continued growth, we are transitioning to a $4.99 monthly subscription, starting on May 13, 2020.
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Should you choose not to sign up for a subscription you will no longer be able to access your Wink devices from the app, with voice control or through the API, and your automations will be disabled on May 13.
Via Jason Snell:
It’s the deadline of a single week that I find incredible. That’s either a sign of desperation or malevolence; either one would make me hesitant to pay them a dime.
Previously:
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What the hell is Wink doing that, on top of an on-premise hub hardware device, you need a $5/mo service to keep the lights on (no pun intended)? An optional $10/yr subscription to enable features like controlling the devices from outside the house I can see?
I was actually kind of glad to hear they were embracing a subscription model. I don't think the current smart hub business model is sustainable otherwise.
I do agree that WInk's handling of the situation is pretty poor. I think a fair approach would be to make users pay for cloud services and software updates that add new functionality, but still provide local-network access to the hub for user's who decide not to subscribe. Oh, and give customer's more than a couple day's notice.
