[quote=“joshua_lyon, post:161, topic:5146”]
that this is a new feature set and they aren’t charging for existing features
[/quote]The post linked isn’t specific enough to make me feel better. In fact, now that Samsung owns ST, the obscure statement actually scares me more. I guess I’ll just have to wait and see what happens in 3 to 6 months.
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See Tyler’s post here: CES 2015 New Stuff - #31 by Tyler
You don’t have to get on board with premium features, they are simply trying to become profitable. If SmartThings doesn’t have a good revenue stream you can bet they won’t last long. For many non-technical folks premium features would be a huge benefit for those that are technical and can do the stuff their own way should hopefully be able to continue doing stuff their own way.
@mattjfrank The only thing that I cannot figure out in my stupid head which is all slushy/mushy and midway frozen due to snow and cold wave here in Jersey is
“SmartThings is rolling out a new subscription home monitoring service (SmartThings Premium) that calls or texts certain people as soon as your smart home detects a problem.”
So, are we going to lose the ability to text if not on premium? Guess we have to wait till things settle down to get the answer.
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I’m in a similar boat: I would pay for a new hub to get local app processing and battery backup, but not if it means manually reinstalling all of my devices. Just the prospect of that makes my head hurt.
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Although the audience for that statement was not ST users, but the broader public and press, who are not up to speed on the state of HA, and are looking for no-hack,-right-out-of-the-box solutions. Over on the CES thread, ST has said they will not charge for existing features.
Just a guess here, but perhaps the Premium feature will be the ability to send SMS to more than one phone number? I know that it’s been a requested feature here.
Hopefully they flesh this out for us soon, but I took the comments about totally new as well as the press release comments to result in something like this:
You can define your emergency contacts and manage them within ST ecosystem, then create rules for how and when to contact the various people based on what or when something happened with the key upgrades being notifications to multiple people and/or actually calling those contacts (active monitoring). Also, it sounded to me like you’d be able to manage user access to give them some control of your smarthome if an event was triggered. Hopefully that user access management is coming to everyone, so we can give kids, friends or houseguests basic functionality.
I’d imagine a good SmartApp developer could already accomplish most of this, so it’s really the video DVR and real-time monitoring/calling contacts that would warrant the premium fees.
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I am new to the ST community but have watched ST since Kickstarter…I just recently decided to take the plunge since I am building a new house in April (gonna deck the whole thing out). In the meantime, my goal was to putz around with my current house and bought a starter kit…and now 2.0 arrives…figures.
Can someone from the ST team elaborate on those late adopters and if there will be any exchange, credit, or additional functionality for those of us buying right now (mine is arriving tomorrow). I know you are by NO means obligated to and I can cancel my order, but really I want the time to get familiar with the system prior to building so I need to play now. Just hoping there will be something for those us that are essentially now putting out money for an inferior version.
Hoping that it will still serve a purpose with a 2.0 hub but if not, I am then only paying for a few months of use. Just curious…(not like i am going to cancel…haha)
Looking forward to being an active member of the community.
Tony
I wish ST would offer an ‘upgrade’ discount for existing users, but I’m not holding my breath. My best guess, they will encourage you to gift it to your poor cousin. 
A more interesting question is what V2.0 will do to the value of the V1.0 hub? One possibility is that they will offer V2.0 at the premium price - $149 or even $199 and keep V1.0 at $99. But if they want to stay competitive, they’d have to keep low entry price, which means that the current hub would have to be discounted to $69 or even $49.
Also, as any marketing dude will tell you, there’s a huge risk in announcing a product 4 month ahead of (planned) release date. With everyone anticipating the ‘latest and greatest’, who’s gonna buy the ‘old junk’? Which means ST may have to discount V1.0 sooner, rather than later.
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Maybe buy 3 devices from ST get free V1.0 hub, then in 2 months after they are hooked send them a coupon for 10% off V2.0.
As mentioned by others I’m happy to pay for hub V2.0 immediately if there is an easy transition for my devices and smart apps. Otherwise I’ll wait until I need the functionality.
Or announce something to utilize your v1 hub as a repeater / extender for your existing devices.
Only if there was some sort of zigbee / zwave signal strength / routing point mapping tool in ST so we could see how things are routing (or not) and the impact / need to add a repeater…
Anyway, don’t count the v1 out as useless. If the v2 has local access, they could easily have the v1 route to it instead of the cloud for offline usage, etc.
They could, but realistically, why would they want to spend engineering resources on the ‘end of life’ product? I’m sure, V1.0 will be discontinued as soon as V2.0 rolls out. The best we can hope is that V1.0 will be maintained at the current feature level.
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I agree…I am holding out that V1 can be used in concert with V2. To be honest, I was reading the forums prior to buying and knew it was happening. Problem is I NEED to work on it now…so I know what i will add in my new house. I think the local processing is huge as I have read where service interruptions mess up a lot…don’t really want to deal with that if I don’t have to. Understand V1 will be fine barring internet outages but I figure I should probably have that fallback with V2.
The realist in me says that even if I considered waiting (which I am not)…announcing this now means a release probably mid year…not 3 months from now 
Either way…looking forward to messing with it tomorrow…biggest thing for me now is coming up with ideas…somethings I have read, I would have never thought of…hoping to get the creative juices flowing.
Its not really resources, since the multiple hub on an account already exists… Why would I want or need to buy 2 or 3 v2 hubs to extend my house?
Worst case, I’ll buy some zigbee repeaters and call it a day, but its the thought that counts…
My guess is that the v1.0 hub will be discontinued as soon as the market will bear the price of the v2.x hub. Supporting two radically different models of hubs is much more costly than putting effort into reducing the BOM and street price of the new hub.
Did anyone notice the delivery date now; “Available in the summer”:
On Monday, it slipped from March 31 to April 30. Now August 31.
It slipped quite a lot in a couple of days.
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I bet my V1 that it will available by the next CES!
Just be thankful it isn’t being funded by a Kickstarter or IndieGogo campaign, because then your money would be tied up indefinitely with zero guarantee any delivery. Pre-sales really suck (present company (SmartThings)'s original Kickstarter being a rare exception … well, it actually slipped quite a bit too and dissatisfied out of the gate with no Android, etc., etc…).
It has become exasperatingly common for established companies to use Kickstarter for Version 2.0 product launches. With the backing of Samsung, I presume SmartThings doesn’t have to stoop that low.
…CP / Terry.
I hope there is no cost in being able to do the same things v1.# does in v2. I bought and have invested in using ST was because it was cheap to start and and the great community, the help and innovative others are and NO MONTHLY FEES. I had a feeling that when ST was acquired by Samsung they would figure a way to make us pay for things we are able to do now for free.