Except when the business model was to sell the hardware at breakeven and make it up with the monthly subscription, and people are buying subsidized hardware and skipping out on the subscription fees.

If the company sets out to create an open platform and has a business model which works in that world, that is a beautiful thing.

Is that the case here and are we seeing a virtuous cycle, are features contributed back to the company and actually integrated into their product? I think that’s a beautiful model but I’m not sure that’s actually what’s happenning here?

Literally the first sentence of the article;

“...its price is cheap but in exchange you are tied to the Xiaomi’s Mi Home App & Cloud.”