> 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 maximal-functional no-cloud mode. The few smart products I buy have a mode like that.

Great feedback. A limited "no-cloud" mode is something we could possibly do, I'll think about it.

I think you are correct that it would really only be a small number of people who would be able to use our docs and write their own firmware for our device. But we want to make it relatively easy to switch between public firmware variants.

So even if you're not an engineer, you can choose to try a different flavor for your device. And if we have to completely shut down our services, you could do that as well.