Futurehome smart hub owners must pay new $117 subscription or lose access | Hacker News Reader

Futurehome smart hub owners must pay new $117 subscription or lose access

arstechnica.com

86 pointsduxup80 comments

This is one of the reasons I am working on an enclosure-compatible open-source version of the 2nd gen Nest thermostat. It reuses the enclosure, encoder ring, display, and mounts of the Nest but replaces the "thinking" part with an open-source PCB that can interact with Home Assistant.

Nest Thermostats of the 1st and 2nd generation will no longer be supported by Google starting October 25, 2025. You will still be able to access temperature, mode, schedules, and settings directly on the thermostat – and existing schedules should continue to work uninterrupted. However, these thermostats will no longer receive software or security updates, will not have any Nest app or Home app controls, and Google will end support for other connected features like Home/Away Assist. It has been pretty-badly supported in Home Assistant for over a year anyway, missing important connected features.

I've got the faceplate PCB done and working; the rotary encoder and ring working; and the display working but with terrible code with a low refresh rate.

I need to ship by October to beat the retirement date. Plans to get some regular development report-outs and pre-orders are coming quite soon.

It's open source, and uses ESP32-C6 so it can be Wifi, BLE, or Zigbee, whatever software you intend to load onto it.

Sounds cool! What do you think of the opensource smart knob https://github.com/scottbez1/smartknob ?

Oh I love it, I drew some inspiration for rotary encoder options from here actually. It reminds me of the older Senic Nuimo from about 10 years ago with a similar goal.

Reusing the Nest is about keeping bill of materials cost very low by reusing old hardware, and not complicating the supply chain with PCB manufacturing plus 3d printing plus metal CNC.

This sounds really interesting! I'd love to see it when you're done.

I wasn't aware that my Nest thermostat was going to be End of Life'd, but I just finished replacing it with an older Honeywell/Zwave combo due to lack of features and general de-googleing. Would be great to do something with the hardware, which is really slick.

The goals have been 1. to help recycle hardware and keep it out of a landfill but more importantly 2. to have an open source thermostat with beautiful design. Nest cared a lot about the aesthetics. as do the people with whom I share my living space and for whom a thermostat has a minimum prettiness acceptable. The Honeywell/ZWave landscape has not shown itself to be "pretty" to me for the most part.

Nice. "If you have the enclosure, we have the board."

Even better, I want to do a "swap shack" style where you buy a refurbed, built model and ship us your old model, which we can then refurb into the next user's home.

I don't know what needs to happen under the hood, but as someone with a Mitsubishi heat pump, if you could demonstrably make it a Kumo Cloud-beater, you'd probably increase sales. Mitsubishi supposedly has the best hardware out there, but their cloud solution S U C K S . . .

You can't even connect it to WiFi with an iOS 18 device due to a so-called "known issue" with iOS 18's Bluetooth architecture. Like what, I'm supposed to buy a new Android device just to hook up your dongle?

Supposedly there's some secret sauce their proprietary thermostats have that third-party ones don't to increase efficiency, or that's what the sales guys claim.

There is this guy: https://clima.protoart.net/

It looks to tick a lot of boxes but isn't quite what I want, and is just expensive enough that I haven't pulled the trigger to test one out anyway. It seems to be well regarded if it does what you're looking for.

(I really only want to add wall thermostats to a new-built house that was designed for mini-splits for the beginning, so it has crappy remotes but no wall thermostats, and to have some button I can press for "all off" to make sure all the mini-splits are actually off. Other features welcome, but those are what I'm really after.)

I was just looking for something almost exactly like this, I have 4 mini-splits, so Arizone would be ~$1,000. This uses the CN104 and looks like it does what Airzone does at ¼ the price. I’ll gamble on one.

This thing is ticking off a lot of boxes for me. What features are you missing?

I read a lot of good reviews on reddit and home assistant forum so ordered one to try out.

there is also the M5 stack rotary knob (esp32)

https://shop.m5stack.com/products/m5stack-dial-esp32-s3-smar...

Missed opportunity for the article to include the video Rossmann has on this: https://youtu.be/RwSkwh3nWv8

I think it’s worth noting that the company which is charging the subscription fee is not the same company that sold the smart hubs: Futurehome declared bankruptcy in May; this fee is being charged by its successor.

What about the people? Are they the same?

> The platform and related services were purchased from the bankruptcy estate—50 percent by former Futurehome owners and 50 percent by Sikom Connect—and are now operated by FHSD Connect AS.

It doesn't matter whether it's shareholders or creditors in charge IMO. Neither party have your interests in mind.

If you don't have the firmware source and an unlocked bootloader you're only renting the device.

That might work for the average HN user that already has a homelab cluster with a dozen kubernetes services running, but for the average joe it might as well be dead.

This is an old argument. FLOSS firmware allows consumer to pay to any external company to fix the device, thus breaking the artificial monopoly of proprietary software.

Sadly that demonstrates how you have to trust the first company ... and anyone else who might buy that company ... :(

So the company has even less claim to those devices it has damaged.

Are we to understand that it is legal to sabotage [1] products if you buy their bankrupt manufacturer? Do I have to care about the corporate health of the maker of every item in my house now?

And does the bankruptcy even matter, legally? The company had a business/contractual relationship with its customers. Selling that contract/relationship to someone else, even through bankruptcy, does not let them unilaterally alter it. E.g. if they had made promises, contractual or even just in marketing, a change of owner is immaterial to the other side of that contract/promise.

[1] This is not hyperbole, but an accurate description of destroying functionality that did not require company servers.

[2] False advertising is a crime, after all.

I mean, I think the answer to 1 is "yes". They wouldn't have bought the asset if they couldn't extort their customers. Now you at least have the option to pay to continue access, versus having no maintenance at all.

Is it ethical? I wouldn't say so, but I do think that is the economic argument.

> Now you at least have the option to pay to continue access, versus having no maintenance at all.

They locked the owners out of their devices, hence the bounty from Rossmann to "hack" them. They gave one option, but took one away.

> I think the answer to 1 is "yes". They wouldn't have bought the asset if they couldn't extort their customers.

It's definitely how the law is currently being applied, and they probably won't have legal trouble from it, but I argue this is a corruption of ownership law, and any kind of update that is against the device owner's wishes (that they are deliberately prevented from reverting) is equivalent to criminal hacking. I can't emphasize this enough - the devices in question do not belong to them. They sold them, these are privately-owned computers they are interfering with.

Especially in the case of bankruptcy - the device owners have no more of a business relationship with this new owner, than they do with a random hacker making printers emit goatse.

Sadly this is probably all clearly spelled out in the original fine print. And the only way to guarantee you can avoid these kind of shenanigans is to go full Stallman and run everything yourself.

If you have an sort of a services subscription with a company and they are dissolved during liquidation -- the most frequent outcome is that the service is no longer available for any price. The business is gone.

If you had a landscaper mowing your lawn and they die, nobody expects the person who buys the lawnmower at the estate sale to continue mowing everyone's lawn.

This isn't any different just because it is a different type of service. Cloud platforms are services and like any other business, they disappear... a lot.

It’s more like if they sold you a lawnmower, but kept the key to start it, and now they’re dead, and someone bought their key cabinet.

In my analogy, the lawnmower is the cloud server, and your sod is your smart hub.

But forget the analogy.

Cloud services are services. If you buy a device that requires continued services to operate, and the service goes away, it doesn’t operate.

People might be mad about this, but I’m sure everyone on this forum is smart enough to realize that servers don’t run themselves

They didnt buy a device that requires connected services. It could work locally. That functionality has been removed in an 'upgrade'.

They destroyed the lawnmower and now want you to rent one.

That sounds awfully like a dependency on services to me. If the device is designed for somebody else to be managing and pushing out offer updates to it on your behalf, that’s a service. I wouldn't buy a lawnmower where normal operation of the device let somebody else change it whenever they feel like it.

The point is that the dependency is artificial. The user you responded to said it wasn't sold as a service, as it had local functionality that was removed post-sale.

The customer didn't buy access to a service with a physical product to serve as support for that service, they purchased functionality, and that functionality is (potentially illegally) being taken away from them.

I understand why people are mad. I just don’t understand why anyone here is surprised.

Nor is there really anything unique about artificial proprietary lock-in when it comes to services. As a business practice it’s not uncommon.

> I just don’t understand why anyone here is surprised.

Are they? To me it looks like legitimate complaints and only that.

> Nor is there really anything unique about artificial proprietary lock-in when it comes to services. As a business practice it’s not uncommon.

It's unique in its illegallity. They're lucky these aren't very expensive products, or people would actually go to court and maybe force the manufacturer's hand for once.

I don't know about the home jurisdiction of this company, but I don't see any reason why this would be illegal in the US. Typically most cloud products outline in their terms that services and their features may change at any point.

The illegality lies on the fact that the product was advertised as having certain functionality on its own.

> Typically most cloud products outline in their terms that services and their features may change it at any point.

The user bought the device before ever agreeing to any terms. At that point they're inherently entitled to the advertised functionality, merely by having their money change hands. Any post-sale agreement is separate from the purchase of the product that was informed by the advertisements.

Except there are two different companies here. The company that initially advertised and launched these products doesn't exist.

The second company bought servers that are connected to devices where users have all clicked through a EULA which likely says that they can change it whenever the heck they want.

> The second company bought servers that are connected to devices where users have all clicked through a EULA which likely says that they can change it whenever the heck they want.

And that EULA is potentially unconscionable, both procedurally and substantively, both due to the prior purchase that was concluded before any EULA came into the picture and the overall balance of power in the terms, the reason being that users have an inherent legal right to use software that comes with a device they purchased regardless of any later agreement.

I do agree that the users have a good case for the right to run the version of the software that the device came with. I don't know if they have a good case to demand specific performance from a different company in order to do that for them. I also think that a EULA, whether enforceable or not in its terms, serves as pretty decent notice that continued software updates are a thing that it does, and those updates may change features, then that the current owners didn't violate anyone's rights by pushing out a software update. But if I were a user trying to revert my device back to the original software, I wouldn't be worried about any legal threats from the current owner.

> I don't know if they have a good case to demand specific performance from a different company in order to do that for them.

I mean, this new company pushed the lockout update and imposed the new terms. If we already assume that the users have the right to the advertised functionality, and that the new company has ties to the consumers by inheriting its contractual relationship with them through the previous company's EULA, it would make the most sense for a court to order them to right their wrong.

Liability for false advertising generally does not transfer in an asset purchase. And the original company didn't really make any false statements. They were just unable to continue to uphold them because they cease to exist. But promises by some other company don't really transfer over unless you have a contract that specifically says that they do. If you're saying that the EULA is that contract, well, that same contract almost certainly gives the service provider the option to change it however they see fit. And I don't know the details here, but usually when something like this happens, any acquiring service provider will usually pop up a click through EULA that's updated for the new service provider, before they push out any further updates, to further strengthen any agreements that might be contained within it before they make any changes. But again, it looks like this company is not in the US so who knows how this may work in some other place.

Is false advertising a crime? If so, there are people who are liable no matter which legal entities they used to pull the scam off. Someone authorized it and someone implemented it. There should be fines and entries put in records.

It is, but this doesn’t qualify. The claims by the original company are of a company that does not exist. And when you buy the assets of a company you are not obligated to continue business the same way nor fulfill any of their promises aside from the acquisition of specific contracts detailing otherwise. Whether they have any of the same employees is irrelevant. Besides being two different businesses, piercing the corporate veil is only done in very certain circumstances.

People are just mad that services which aren't essential to operation are being used to force people into subscriptions, or to enable features which could've been implemented without the server (and thus without the additional cost to the company).

Like with Nest going EOL. There's no reason that it needed a wifi connection to operate. The server doesn't hold any useful information and just proxies instructions to your nest device when you use the app.

It would have been nice if rather than wifi being used to communicate with googles' servers, wifi was just used to communicate with your app on your device via the local network. Or bluetooth was available as a fallback.

Yeah, it’s buyers remorse. Buy devices that rely on cloud services, and you are at the mercy of that continued service. I just find it absolutely wild that some seem to be surprised by this in a technical forum of all places.

I’m a nest early adopter affected by the nest EOL. I presume you mean: there’s no reason it needs a cloud service? Because it definitely needs network access for you to connect to it remotely.

But if you are familiar at all with the history of IOT devices, the reason why cloud connected devices took off in popularity, is because they do NAT traversal for you. Most people struggled to set these devices up before the advent of cloud IOT.

Let's not conflate the cloud service, with locking the devices from their users and preventing even non-cloud-functionality.

It's like if the landscaper tried charging me for using my own lawnmower, myself.

If you can use the box without the service, just do it.

I think the actual answer is that you can't. Just because the technology is there in such a way that it theoretically could, doesn't mean that is actually what you bought.

> If you can use the box without the service, just do it.

They prevented that by locking the boxes, and threatened prosecution to someone trying to undo those locks: Futurehome CEO threatens police action after I offer $5,000 bounty to free his ransomed customers - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RwSkwh3nWv8

If you buy a device that remotely executes code as a matter of normal operation, there isn’t anything local about it.

The article says "purchased from the bankruptcy estate—50 percent by former Futurehome owners..." So that sounds like the same people/company no?

Completely different company with some of the same owners.

My smart home actively avoids anything with a cloud sign and tries to avoid anything without a Zigbee logo for exactly this reason. There’s no way a Zigbee device could get flashed with a firmware which requires an external server.

Same here, but man, it's hard to find devices with zigbee ... manufacturers all want to sell you their f-ing cloud service. They heard it is more monetizable yet they don't really know how and end up shutting down the service anyway. Long live to (literally) programmed obsolescence. Annoying.

It is hard to overstate how wrong they are doing things if it costs more than a dollar or so per year for managed configuration. I previously worked for a cloud managed device company and it was obscene how high the margin was on the mandatory software licenses we bundled with the hardware and we were also collecting a huge amount of data, not just providing configuration.

Is that including R&D cost and maintenance? Or just raw hosting cost? These systems are more than just code and need active maintenance and defense.

If the company went bankrupt and just disappeared, people would still be able to use their device.

Learnt my lesson with wemo and google nest. Google Home assistant seems to give garbage 50% of the time (see r/googlehome).

All in on zigbee and zigbee2mqtt connecting to my local ubuntu server (used for plex as well). I'll write damn custom react-native apps and sideload them onto my android phone then deal with these shitty companies again.

If you have the skills, it might be worth investing some time into this. It isn't as hard or scary as you'd imagine.

> “It is regrettable that we now have to spend time and resources strengthening the security of a popular service rather than further developing functionality for the benefit of our customers.”

Based on all the data leaks that happen constantly on cloud connected, data harvesting services, I have zero faith that these companies care about security. These companies couldn't care less if they leak personal data online, but god forbid someone is trying to root our device or flash another OS, now suddenly we need to strengthen our security. Fuck these people frankly.

“Someone tried to outscam us and that would stain our reputation. We mustn’t allow that.”

As in, reputation in the eyes of investors and creditors, obviously.

It is one thing for a company to discontinue offering a service that they used to provide for free; but it is completely different to take steps to brick a device that would otherwise continue to work, if the user does not buy something not discussed in the original transaction (e.g. a subscription).

Sounds like the new owners of this already morally and financially bankrupt company are going to go bankrupt all over again if they are trying to pull this kind of scam bait and switch on their small and shrinking user base.

Seriously. Who is going to buy another Futurehome product knowing that they feel entitled to extort their customers, whose only alternative is to remove the devices integrated into their home?

This is going to become more and more of a problem with all "smart" device manufacturers whose devices rely on them keeping a backend service stood up. These manufacturers will all eventually 1. go bankrupt, killing their service, 2. end/sunset the service in ways that nerf/brick devices, or 3. start charging for what used to be free.

Unlike traditional dumb devices (or local-only smart devices) we cannot rely on these things working as they once did forever. Best bet is to avoid them entirely.

Homeassistant + zigbee/matter or local wifi is the way to go...

I had a Wink hub maybe 7 years ago, I bought it for somewhere around $150. Later, they decided to add a monthly subscription fee to the device. I cut my losses and quit using the thing.

I no longer do smart home anything. Switched outlets are great. Relevant Technology Connections: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2DGqVbTHX-k

This is why if you have a choice you should buy devices that have ‘local only’ option.

Unfortunately the masses dont care or dont have the technical knowledge to taoe advantage of it

Agreed, although if it has any online management / phone home / software updates, that can be removed.

In the end it's about trust if there's any other party involved. And you hope you can trust the next person who maybe buys the company.

> that can be removed.

I'm surprised that there isn't more legal action from this behavior

Other thing I have started doing is to stop doing any upgrade for things that are already working locally. Example: no more upgrades for HP printer software.

The thing is that may not have saved them here. They did an update to make it stop working. You would need to be local only and stay there and never use the online features.

"Auto-executes code from the internet" sounds diametrically opposed to "local only"

Yes. However, what will happen is most will be 'fail to local only' but if that update server ever comes back to life, you are doomed.

many smart home products use different protocols than wifi. This means they will not be updated without your knowledge and cannot connect online themselves.

I already avoid devices that require subscription rather than allowing ownership. If someone decides to change the terms of the deal after I bought the device to gate previously accessible functionality behind a paywall I guarantee that they will never see another nickel of mine for the rest of our shared existence on this earth. I don't actually care that your costs exceed your revenue. Shut down then. It's your problem to price things in a way that pays for your costs as a business, not mine, and it's your problem to uphold agreements you made or to fail as a business.

> avoid devices that require subscription

This is fine if the device is stand-alone. But if its operation depends on any back end service, then your choice makes it inevitable that it will cease operating at some point in the future. Nobody, no matter how drugged-up their marketing folks are, is going to provide that service forever for no charge.

Then it makes an awful lot of sense to get that service for free/at a one-time cost until their marketing team sobers up, doesn't it? It's only a bait and switch if they switch before I get the bait.

Didn't need a Nostradamus to see this coming.

This is basically sabotage for a ransom demand, which should be punishable by imprisonment.

This is a reason why I would NEVER in my life have anything what is calling itself "smart" controlling any important functions in my house. It is just a trojan horse ready to cripple my own living any time when owners of C2 server will feels like so.

This is why I’m so anti-IoT for major appliances in my home (eg refrigerator, washing machine).

I want local only, never contact the mothership.

A great reminder that one-off hardware costs don't indefinitely cover third party support, especially if that includes services and apps without another obvious revenue stream.

A lot of people want to call this switch and bait, or a scam, but consumers need to apply their own critical thinking to purchases like this. Some of these devices have had service for nearly a decade. Is that terrible for a £200 device?

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