Paying £4 a month for use of your own doorbell?

theinquirer.net

6 points·galaxyLogic··3 comments

If it provides value, why not?

I have a Nest Hello and pay Nest the monthly fee to have recordings and alerts of people who come to my door. It's worth the $3/mo. If I didn't want to pay them, I could still use the doorbell as a regular dumb doorbell, but the utility it provides for the cost is worth it to me.

I think the author implies that the hypothetical $4 service adds no value, other than changing the pricing and ownership terms. Imagine if all doorbell manufacturers decided to only sell a subscription service and not a device to own - then from a one time $50 purchase, they've milked you into $4/month for life. The camera and security will be a $4 extra, per month. Premium AI with real time face recognition (from Facebook of course) will be another $4 extra.

> I'm not saying the whole n-as-a-service culture is a bad thing.

Is is not a bad thing, it is a horse @#$*! It smells with rentier capitalism and serfdom. Especially IP and copyright which is just a global cenzorship in disguise.

Lack of control and dependency on third-party is what I don't like the most. All I want is to buy a thing and forget about the seller.

- Cannot upgrade, downgrade, copy on-demand

- Tied to lifetime, profitability of the service

- Cannot fix the price

- Cannot prevent from adding "features" like ads or microtransactions

- Connectivity requirements

- One more account

- No privacy

- Cenzorship (ban, restriction by territory)

The list goes on.

> In 2012, Bruce Willis took Apple to court after discovering that he couldn't leave his iTunes library to his children - on his death, the rights are nullified

We need something like this for wealth.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com