A couple of thoughts…
The hack is clever, but I’m not sure it’s practical.
First, have you considered battery life? As replenishment buttons, I wouldn’t be surprised if Amazon planned on a battery life of about 100 pushes. Wi-Fi is a high-power protocol. If you’re using these as regular home automation buttons, I suspect they’re going to be like the Arlo cameras, and you’ll have a battery life of a couple of weeks. In contrast, flics are using Bluetooth low-energy, are intended for multiple pushes per day, and still have a battery life of several years (about 60,000 pushes, per spec).
Second, the hack requires running a 24 hour server to catch the button pushes. That could be a regular PC or Mac, and I know a lot of people are running those. Or a pi. I’m not. I use the laptop about twice a month, only for programs that can’t run on anything else, and it’s unplugged in between. Most of the time I use tablets. Energy cost for the tablet is considerably lower than for the laptop, usually given as around 4% of the laptop’s energy draw. ( that is, laptop uses 25 times as much energy. ) A raspberry pi uses less energy than a PC, but still about five times that of a tablet.
http://cleantechnica.com/2012/06/28/tablet-pcs-save-energy-ipads-cost-only-1-38-per-year-charge/
So there are some hidden dollar costs, as well as environmental costs, to choosing the Dash button over the flic.
There’s also the question of how many Wi-Fi connections your router will support. Netgear routers for example are typically limited to 32 devices per band. The theoretical limit for most home routers is 255 devices, but that’s usually terrible performance. 50 is a more practical limit. The more devices you add, the sooner you’ll run into some kind of issue on your Wi-Fi. With the Dash, it’s probably more of an issue for those who assign IP addresses rather than an operational issue, though. So it’s just something to keep in mind when you’re talking about adding a dozen new buttons.
But I suspect the bigger issue is going to be the battery life. If it dies in less than two months, I don’t see people being very happy with it. Even if it lasts six months, that’s a little iffy for a switch that could fail at any time.
Obviously, everyone will make their own choices, but just something to keep in mind before you install a bunch of these for mission-critical purposes.
FWIW