I am also considering purchasing the SmartThings Hub. I have search prices for compatible devices and they all seem to be somewhat expensive.
For example I am looking to buy a couple motion detectors (mainly for the door + balcony), but they all seem to be around $40 each. Am I better off just buying the SmartThings home monitoring kit?
I figured buying this hub would allow me to save in the long run buy being able to buy 3rd party devices at a cheaper cost.
Can anyone recommend where to buy compatible devices at a cheaper cost, and also if there is a surefire way to tell if a device is compatible?
For now the main devices I would be interested in are:
motion sensors
speakers
device required to sync with a tv to turn on/enable netflix (sorry haven’t done any research into this yet)
For other devices see the following ( this is a clickable link):
As far as pricing, $40 is a typical retail price for many devices. In addition, there are a lot of different kinds of options that you can use with SmartThings. If you’re willing to order from gearbest, which is a retailer which imports from China, you can get the Xiaomi line of sensors which typically cost about $12 each. However, these are not certified devices and operation may be quirky. There are a number of community members who are willing to take the risk that they will stop working at some point just because they are so inexpensive. You can read more about them here:
As far as certified devices go, you just have to keep shopping around. Devices do go on sale and there are sometimes ones at Home Depot or Lowe’s. I think all the sensors that I have were $22 or less. But I shopped a lot of sales.
Community members will post deals that they see in the deals category of the forum, so that’s a good place to look as well
I don’t have any of the SmartThings branded devices other than the hub. I use all z-wave or wifi devices; 90% of mine were bought on sale or discount.
Here in the SmartThings community there is a deals category. Click this link then in the upper right next to “new topic” change the pulldown to “watching”. https://community.smartthings.com/c/devices-integrations/deals Then you’ll have a little blue notification in this site for every new deal posted here.
A lot of responses posting to US deals but I’m in Canada, although it does look like I should be able to get sensors for under 20CAD so that’s enough for me to pull the trigger on the hub.