I’m done with Samsung appliances/devices.
Short sighted move that will only alienate your customers.
Should have expected as much after you started trying to put adverts on my fridge.
And if, as observed…
Then surely the only real question, at least for SmartThings users, is what impact this could have on Edge driver development.
It seems fairly clear that third-party integrations (HA, Node-RED, etc.) could be affected. But to be clear, this is a SmartThings community, not a Home Assistant one.
In my case, I’ll presumably be affected because of my Node-RED integration. Apart from it being cloud-based—which I’ve never been keen on—the recent PAT changes already warned me that some kind of toll gate was probably on the way.
My concern is this quote:
Combine that with the one about users of the SmartThings App and WWST devices and it could easily be interpreted as the ‘free tier’ being those who only engage with SmartThings via the client apps, and the ‘developer community’ being those users who want access to a bit more to provide a more bespoke and optimal experience. To me that would include those installing community drivers as that is not part of the base offering.
A free Bog Standard level, with a subscription based Dogs Wotsits level for those who want extra functionality (and no ads) is a common model and not even unreasonable. The problem SmartThings have is the quality isn’t currently there in the premium offering.
I think this understates what many community developers actually do. Out of the roughly 30 Edge drivers I’ve published, I only personally use two of them. The rest were developed on request for other users. And for many of those devices, there’s still no official driver available - and probably never will.
Here’s a nice example of what we do: my driver for the Sonoff valves was released about four weeks ago. Funny enough, two weeks later, the PR for these devices surfaced.
Now compare the features: official (bare minimum profile) vs. my driver. The official driver is more or less useless without the special features. Adding fingerprints is not the same as developing a complete driver that supports all of the devices features and settings. Yes, the vendor can now claim that it’s officially WWST certified and therefore supported by SmartThings, but only the most basic feature: turn the valve on and off. Every customer expects much, much more - they bought exactly that device for all its nifty features.
So, often times we’re also adding the missing features with our drivers for WWST certified devices.
A win-win-win situation for the customer, the vendor, and - at the end - SmartThings.
And we’re doing it for free! We’re not getting anything in return!
Edit: this feature matrix for the aforementioned Sonoff valves speaks for itself (Sonoff vs. Home Assistant vs. SmartThings):
Isn’t that extremely embarrassing for SmartThings?
No. We’re doing what SmartThings developers should do. Community developers are adding the missing check marks.
Now you are getting charged! “Nice contribution, here is your $4,99 bill!” 
Wow, this is the nail in the coffin for me to ever buy another Samsung product.
I have one Samsung product, a stove, and every time the power goes out the clock resets and won’t reset the time despite the stove being on wifi.
I was super happy that home assistant allowed me to work around that issue automatically, and now I see they’re gonna charge $5 per month for this?
If cloud is so expensive then let us NOT use the cloud and do this all locally. What a joke, this is nothing but a flagrant cash grab. I’m glad I don’t own any other Samsung products and if they go through with this change you can bet it’ll be my last!
If they provided a local API and/or made the ST Hubs into Matter Bridges we would not need to use the cloud to connect with Home Assistant.
The $5 monthly fee will probably push me into converting fully to Home Assistant and abandoning SmartThings. I just need to figure out a simple interface for Family members.
I severely reduced my IFTTT usage after they started charging a fee, so I could stay in the free tier which is only 2 automations.
A common theme here seems to be users controlling Samsung appliances (including TVs) via Home Assistant. Is this because SmartThings can’t do the job itself, or because it can’t do it using Routines and once you get beyond that you might as well do it in Home Assistant? Or something else?
Just trying to find my position on this one. Given the limited details available, I couldn’t think why those using the HA integration would be in any way surprised that they would expect to have to pay a subscription. However, if the ‘free tier’ includes access to the integration with Google and Alexa then that seems rather unfair.
Hmmm, a whole stream of ‘first time’ HA posts in our community. I guess we are supposed to welcome them to our community.
Wait, am I missing anything or there is no free quota for personal usage mentioned at all?
This forum is mostly used by people with Smartthings hubs. This is a small fraction of SmartThings app users. The problem is that many people who bought Samsung products like Air Conditioners, Tv’s, Microwaves etc. only use the SmartThings app. Until now, they could then integrate these devices into their preferred Smarthome platform via the Cloud API. I suspect a large number of HA users falls into this category.
Now. most people don’t replace their fridges, stoves, AC systems, Microwaves, etc every 5 years. These loyal Samsung clients are now stuck with a $5 a month bill for many years to come, if they prefer to intgrate to another SmartHome platform. This is daylight robbery. It will be interesting to see what this will do to their brand loyalty and also what percentage of people will subscribe to this.
I’m curious to that too… I want to buy all home appliances from Samsung, I hope that the HA integration keep work…
The HA integration will keep on working but at a cost of $5 pm to access the API
I see a lot of unhappy customers on various forums like the one below.
SmartThings continues to improve its capabilities, so my response is not really about the lack of Routines.
For many of us, the turning point was the move away from Groovy. That transition greatly reduced the ability to create complex but compact automations directly within SmartThings. Projects like WebCoRE and Echo Speaks are good examples of functionality that pushed users toward platforms like Hubitat and, eventually, Home Assistant.
You can certainly argue that SmartThings has a more polished and consumer-friendly experience than Hubitat. However, when compared to Home Assistant, neither platform comes close to matching the flexibility of the automation engine or the quality of the UI. The desktop interface and native mobile applications in Home Assistant are exceptionally well done, and the level of customization is remarkable.
Both Hubitat and Home Assistant also provide meaningful local processing capabilities, something SmartThings has struggled to deliver at scale despite years of promises.
Which brings us back to Samsung appliances. Samsung leads the market in the amount of telemetry, controls, and sensors exposed by their appliances and TVs. The dependency on cloud APIs is frustrating, but currently unavoidable. If Samsung provided robust local interfaces for their devices, I would drop SmartThings immediately.
Not sure if that fully answers your question, but I suspect that is the primary perspective driving much of this discussion.
I mean yeah. There’s legit no reason for more TV related routines to not be available. Just simple stuff. The APP knows I’m on YouTube right now, but that can’t be used for an automation because???
With the announcement of pay-level cloud/API access, this accelerated the implementation of Home Assistant as a partial (or even full) replacement of ST.
Our production environment currently consists of a V2 hub, with a Hubitat C-7 providing interfacing to several devices that ST can’t handle via Edge, linked locally back to ST via Mira. ST is handling Zigbee and Zwave devices and ties all them together to Alexa. The ST mobile app has a very high WAF with being easy to navigate, available anywhere, and a single mobile app for every device. At one point years ago I thought Hubitat would be the natural replacement for ST but the dashboards/mobile experience still isn’t as polished/easy as ST, and data retention is limited due to storage space on the C-7. I was never a WebCoRE person so none of that enticed me either.
I like the Edge environment, writing and maintaining several drivers for ST that hopefully people have found useful. I prefer Lua over Groovy or Python, but the HA ecosystem is just too deep to ignore.
Last year I invested in a mini PC with the branded zwave and zigbee antennas and planned on implementing a “real” Home Assistant environment just to try it out. So far the experience has been excellent. For the migration phase I’ve moved all the devices previously handled by Hubitat->Mira over to HA, and then mirrored them back to ST via Matterbridge, so now HE can be shutdown. Once I get all the zwave/zigbee devices directly handled by HA I can move Alexa handling to HA (thru NabuCasa subscription) removing it from ST and can move our “production” (aka family facing) mobile app to HA directly.
ST has been a great product thru the years but I can also appreciate the increased costs for cloud access/interfacing, and the need to pass those along to the consumer. It just made me dig into alternatives quicker for this particular implementation. For other homes I manage with much less complexity ST could continue to function (for free, which is way more than I can expect these days) just fine.
Interested to see how this all shakes out over the coming months.
I personally don’t intend to pay that fee.
If it affects the edge drivers I developed (EF00 and default clusters), then it is a warning to the users of these drivers that they both probably will stop working.
Oh wait..this is gonna effect Sharptools, ain’t it? That’s lame.
I’m a former user of the old Mi Casa Verde, which later became Vera Control and is now known as Ezlo. Last week, their API access policy changed: now, to access the controller via the web, customers have to shell out $2.50 a month. I get that maintaining cloud services is expensive, and I believe all platforms will eventually migrate to paid models. That’s why the workaround I found to avoid paying for web access was to set up a home VPN, allowing my phone to connect directly to my local network.
But then they cannot as easily extract more money out of you by either selling your data or requiring a subscription.