Starlink shifts hardware from one-time purchase to $10/month rental | Hacker News Reader

Starlink shifts hardware from one-time purchase to $10/month rental

arstechnica.com

40 pointsLihh2722 comments

I keep getting offers for $50/mo for service but my area is considered a premium market or something and they want $500 up front for the service (nothing to do with the hardware)

I live in suburbs. They obviously know I have cable and other options so gouge me if I want them.

I was going to go with $50/mo with the free hardware and keep it for backup when primary goes down. But not with that much commitment and no guarantees. They’ve already bumped the standby price (for no usage) to $10/mo on the mini

I suspect this will change, or not roll out in many places, or users will get the choice between up-front or rental. Router rental isn't tolerated by the market in the UK or AU from what I've seen.

It will only change if it becomes illegal to rent a router.

Nah, it will just become untenable to rent a router, because of the added obligations.

I'm saying it will change with market forces. In the US renting your router is the norm, it'll stick, and I'm sure it was a US based team that thought this would be a good idea. In some other countries it'll never get off the ground because the concept will get laughed out of the room and everyone will just use competitors.

You could argue that Starlink have a captive audience, but that's not true in most of the UK/AU at least, where high speed internet is widely available to most. Those who need Starlink probably already have it and own the hardware, their growth market will have to be homes that have other options, and those other options don't charge $10 a month for the hardware.

For AU consumers it puts even more obligations onto starlink. Only Telstra does this, that I am aware of, and their rental device comes with full remote configuration support for the duration. Telstra of course is targeting "Sell this product to your in laws and you never have to give them router support again". Starlink on the other hand, are trying the old Wisp gamble of hoping that people keep paying for their hardware long after it has paid off, which is probably a poor decision at least where Australia is concerned.

This might be reflected in upcoming metrics reported on Friday if the IPO goes through. It seems aligned with improving subscriber growth metrics, smoothing out upfront hardware costs into predictable monthly revenue, and generally increasing adoption by lowering the barrier to entry. Curious if anyone closely following the IPO story has more context on this.

Don't forget "sudden price hikes" and "aggressively overselling"...

Agreed - this shifts large single time purchases into MRR which looks way better to investors.

I think it makes sense as their expensive hardware makes me much less likely to order their services.

$199 is expensive hardware? to receive magic internet sent from orbit to wherever you are on the globe?

I feel like if I took my AT&T home internet router, drop-kicked it into the bay, then asked for a replacement, they'd charge me a heck of a lot more than $199. :)

Let the price gouging begin.

They're becoming just another shitty ISP. Just a few months ago they offered me a Mini for no monthly cost, as long as I kept a service plan on it. Standby mode was $5/mo. I was looking forward to using it this summer, and activating a roam plan for a few months.

3 months later, standby mode goes up to $10/mo and they jacked up my regular rates again to $120/mo. I sent the fucking mini back. Talk about bait and switch.

So then I heard they came up with this 200mbit plan that was only $85/mo. I have a gen 1 dish, which can only do about 140mbits anyways. So why am I even on this fucking 'max' plan? But the cheaper plans are "not available in my area". I'm guessing that's because I have no other options in my area.

> Customers who rent Starlink hardware instead of owning it will not be allowed to pause their service.

Wow, get fucked!

I'm just even more mad, because it means folks will be so so much less Right to Repair, Right to Tinker, about this property they no longer can own.

If you break it, then what do you pay? But what if you fix it after? Oh sorry, that device has been deactivated forever, of course of course of course.

Nightmare hell mode from such an evil evil evil murderous inflaming (literally, last night) chainsaw wielding government (DOGE) & person murdering (USAID) man. You will own nothing intensifies.

power cable is extra $4.99/month

That's what my ISP does with the cable modem. Why not?

My ISP gives me the equipment for free and the same bandwidth at a lower price than my prior ISP.

I bring my own modem/router and access point and pay my ISP $35/month for 1Gb up/down. Why would I pay $10 forever when I can bring my own equipment that is much better and fully controlled by me?

There are a couple reasons. What I found when I owned my own modem was whenever there was a problem I first had to convince them the problem was on their end, since they could always shrug and say "it's probably your modem". They can connect to their own equipment and immediately identify the problem.

The other reason is you might not have the money when you sign up. For a lot of people it's easier to come up with $10 than (in Starlink's case) $500.

I guess we are well into the enshittification phase of starlink. Here's hoping Amazon Leo comes soon so we can have some competition in this market.

I'm not sure it will be as much a competition as a cartel, two of the world's richest people playing space cowboy

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