Hacker News Reader

True. And Google says basic digital ones are cheap, I just bought a six pack from Amazon for $9.99.

That said it does have an alerting capability…but even then Amazon shows products for $15 that have wireless alerting.

So yeah, $72 per unit indeed looks to be a waste of money.

$400k in the context of custom development, testing, and administration? That's cheap. And frankly this approach is much more appropriate than the alternatives of defense contractor pork, defective-by-design consumer "cloud", or having people manually do rounds and record numbers.

Also if you want to claim some high ground about not "wasting money", I don't know why you'd use an example of buying Chineseum from overpriced Amazon rather than getting it drop shipped.

I got the sense from the article the software was already done, the $400k seemed to be just for the devices. I could be wrong, the article was difficult to follow in places.

Even if they weren’t creating their own devices, they also need to pay the developer(s) that are going to write the backend and fleet management software.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com