I think there’s an important distinction that might have been missed here.
The $4.99/month plan (and the new commercial tiers) is only being introduced for people using the SmartThings API - specifically “non-commercial, individual developers.” The announcement is very clear that this change does not affect the millions of regular SmartThings users who just use the official app and their devices.
Those regular users are also consuming cloud infrastructure every single day:
- Remote access and control from outside the home
- Push notifications and alerts
- Routines and automations that aren’t fully local/Edge
- Device history, presence detection, and Samsung account integration
- The app itself talking to the backend
If the main justification is truly that “cloud infrastructure is not free” and that users/organisations should pay for the cloud resources they consume, then it would logically follow that every SmartThings user who relies on the cloud backend should contribute something - not just the relatively small group of individual developers using the public API.
Instead, SmartThings is choosing to keep the consumer experience completely free while adding a fee only for API access by individual developers (and higher tiers for commercial use). That suggests the goal isn’t primarily a broad cost-recovery exercise across all cloud usage, but rather monetising the developer/platform side of the business separately from the end-user product.
For people like you who have been using the API mainly to build community Edge drivers, this does represent a new ongoing cost for something that was previously free. That’s why you’re seeing a lot of negativity - many in the community feel the change is being framed as “necessary because cloud costs money,” when in reality only one specific group of users is being asked to pay.
It’s possible to support SmartThings wanting to make money from serious commercial users and heavy API consumers while still feeling this particular approach (a flat monthly fee aimed at individual/hobbyist developers) is poorly targeted.
I’ll probably pay the $4.99 fee because I get real value from the API, but SmartThings shouldn’t sell the change as “paying for cloud infrastructure” when the millions of regular users who rely on the cloud every day through the app aren’t being charged anything. Quite a lot of those users would likely have jumped ship years ago without the independent developers who created Edge drivers and the broader community that has provided ongoing support, workarounds, and improvements.