Someone on another post commented regarding the fact Homey was open source and apps are free etc.
Interested on peoples thoughts about the below:
I think you’ve stumbled across a very good point here, and one Athom could do with looking into. Why not reduce the cost of the homey device and charge for apps? I’d happily pay for something I knew was being looked after and kept up to date - instead of issues like the Hive app, Heatmiser app amongst many others.
They can’t be making much money apart from the hardware, and once you’ve bought that what else - 99p a month for backup and promises of other stuff which is yet to materialise.
Your suggestion would be a great way to create more income. Get some decent full time devs in - rewrite the apps starting with most users first, and charge a one off fee accordingly for them, or Homey Pro perhaps a tiered subscription where you can have 5 apps for £3 a month, 10 apps for £6 a month etc.
I’m more than happy to pay for apps on my phone that interact with Hue, creating effects etc - charge a % above cost for the hardware (which surely can’t be more than £100 and charge for the apps, I’d happily switch to that.
On a side note I hope something is in the pipeline for new hardware as I can’t see much benefit in upgrading at the moment - Can’t see why we can’t have external aerial connectors and ethernet as standard.
I think their would be very much resistance in the community. But when you look into detail this is the only sustainable model. Maybe the user base is not big enough to pay 2-3 fulltime developers with this model? Users are willing to pay for a good working app see the donations that some apps receive.
This is interesting. In my point of view the payment for apps would be ok if the price is reasonable.
For example I have 34 apps. If the price would be 0,10€/year/app I would pay 3,4€/year. That’s ok for me because the automation savings achieved with Homey are around 1000€/year for me. Of course I understand that the financial benefit of the automation is not so much to everyone.
Some examples
10000 customers with 10 apps each → 10000€/year to Athom.
10000 customers with 20 apps each → 20000€/year to Athom.
100000 customers with 10 apps each → 100000€/year to Athom.
100000 customers with 20 apps each → 200000€/year to Athom.
These numbers are not so much when talking about company level. Though I don’t know how many customers Athom have and how many of them would be willing to pay, it could be higher or lower.
With so many alternatives available, payment for apps will never work. Homey does not do anything unique and why would a new user choose to pay monthly?
New Amazon Echo devices include a zigbee hub and Google is planning to do the same. This will satisfy the regular user. People who are looking for a more deeper system will probably go with Home Assistant or something like that.
As a new user on a very steep learning curve I would gladly pay for stable apps with solid documentation. Too often I fiddle with an app that does work smoothly and find that the problem is caused by a mixture of my ignorance, moving app spec and fragmented community comments.
