Today I received the following email from Scott’s related to the discontinuation of the Plantlink product line (They purchased in dec 2016). There was a cloud outage and they decided instead of fixing a product line they bought, that would trash it and ask you to pay more to replace it… But they were nice enough to give me 25% coupon code if I wanted to replace with the GRO system… (THAT IS SARCASM)
Dear Valued Customer,
This letter contains important information regarding significant changes to PlantLink.
Recently there was a cloud outage for PlantLink Basestations and Sensors, which affected all PlantLink users. During this outage, your Basestation turned red and your sensors have not reported new soil moisture data.
After careful analysis of the situation, we have decided to discontinue service and support for PlantLink as of today.
We value the trust our customers have put in us and apologize for this inconvenience. We’d like to help you get back to growing by offering you a 25% discount off any product on Scotts.com or Miraclegro.com*.
For 25% off any product on Scotts.com or Miraclegro.com, use coupon code: 25SMGPL by March 7, 2019.*
As always, your feedback is very important as we are constantly looking for ways to improve our products/service. To best serve you, all inquiries and questions should be directed through our Customer Services team at 1-855-976-5315.
On behalf of PlantLink team, thank you for your loyalty and I apologize for any inconvenience this announcement may cause.
My plants would weep over this if they had not already dried out and died because mine has not worked sine the end of summer.
If you read the reviews of the Scotts crap, well it is crap. sadly I have yet to find anything that worked as well as these.
1 Like
tgauchat
(ActionTiles.com co-founder Terry @ActionTiles; GitHub: @cosmicpuppy)
6
That’s the most weirdly worded excuse for a shutdown that I’ve ever read.
It’s half-transparent (“Our platform is an f-ing mess and we’ve decided not to fix it.”) and half-BS (“after careful analysis of the system”? … ummm… nope: >>After realizing that it is no longer profitable to run this platform…<<).
I got the same email weeks ago, and at first I was concerned but as I looked to find what has stoped working all I could find is that their iOS app has stopped updating, but the Smartthings integration still works, maybe cause I never used the planklink hub. I dont think this effects smartthings users who connected their planklinks to the ST hub… at least not yet.
They had 877 kickstarter backers and I don’t believe they picked up many users after launch. I could see there being less than 1,000 users when they made this decision but I could be off-base.
I was very excited and hopeful when I bought a kit in early 2016 but the official integration with SmartThings never realized full potential, just like the product itself.
Where have I heard this before? Oh that’s right, just a few days ago when Lowes killed off Iris. In their communication they said something like “we remain committed to smart blahblahblah”… it’s amazing how we just get lied to as a matter of course, and are expected to accept it.
1 Like
tgauchat
(ActionTiles.com co-founder Terry @ActionTiles; GitHub: @cosmicpuppy)
10
Well… As a small business owner, I can tell you that bullshitting is a heck of a lot easier than being transparent.
We are rather transparent with whatever information we decide to publish (including being transparent about not publishing a road-map / plans / promises that are too likely to be broken due to factors outside our control or the plain and simple need to remain flexible as a prudent business practice).
Yet we get a lot more, ummm… “less than cordial” responses to this honesty than if we instead used BS phrases that have been quoted in this Topic.
Consumers do not appreciate honesty. They want hope - even if that leads to shattered expectations.
Kickstarter & IndieGogo project creators almost always give extremely optimistic delivery time ETAs and minimize the descriptions of the risks they face. I’d have much higher respect if they give conservative or even pessimistic timelines … but then their campaign would look much less attractive and the number of funders would drop by half or more.
I’m late to seeing this. I have five sensors and the hub plus a stack of AAAA batteries just for these things. They even sold these at Home Depot. The fact they didn’t opensource the project or let someone to self host is just idiotic. They killed a product that worked fine and just made it useless. This is a Yahoo! type move to acquire a company just to shut it down.
. 
that’s definitely a tone deaf note.