> We're working on mitigating this by having an open hardware platform. The idea being that, even if our cloud service isn't up, you can re-flash the hardware to do anything you want. And you can use our documentation to do it so you don't have to reverse-engineer everything from scratch.

I think that's absolutely great. I've had enough IoT products brick on me that I avoid most out of principle now. I'd change my mind for a product that make it clear they've implemented a customer-friendly plan for when the servers inevitably are shut down.

That said, I think your plan really only seems to help tinkerers. There may be no way around that for what you're building, but I think graceful degradation in functionality is preferable, such as having a maximally-functional no-cloud mode. The few smart products I buy have a mode like that.