From a SmartThings standpoint, The most interesting thing in the story are the statistics about the size of the current market. (Not some projected future use.) There are over 4 million existing customers for the systems, which ties in with the comment at CES 2017 from a Z wave alliance representative that “2/3 of zwave devices are professionally installed.”
Based on various published comments in the past, it seems likely that the total number of SmartThings customers is less than 250,000. So as far as market trends, the Smart-Home – as – a – service (SHaaS) companies are big influencers.
tgauchat
(ActionTiles.com co-founder Terry @ActionTiles; GitHub: @cosmicpuppy)
2
I put the estimate at closer to 500,000; but don’t ask how I calculate it. I also don’t know how many of those are active customers (vs. those who returned the hub and/or just disconnected it).
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tgauchat
(ActionTiles.com co-founder Terry @ActionTiles; GitHub: @cosmicpuppy)
3
Which I find rather surprising given this Community’s strong reluctance to purchase any subscription / recurring fee based services.
Perhaps that’s because SmartThings explicitly focuses on the non-recurring fee market segment.
I think it goes together. I don’t think most people would put up with the odd complexities of SmartThings, or any of its DIY competitors, unless they felt really strongly about not using the fee-based services.
I for one am just tired of recurring fees. I only have so much a month to go around and every company is trying to find a way to get some of it. Not happening if I can help it. Had a free Iris hub as a second setup at my camper, ditched it for ST and monthly cost was a major consideration.
It’s an alarming trend, especially for electronic products and software that previously didn’t require them before. Adobe Creative Cloud comes to mind as one of the biggest offenders. Lowe’s too for Iris, although they should be embarrassed charging to use that crappy, unstable platform. Parallels is trying to nudge customers in this direction and when they finally do I’m done.
