How much do you think a server for config files costs? The true cost is very little here. You can make a server host a million thermostat connections for less than a thousand dollars per year. But let's 10x that to be safe, and have a sysadmin dedicate an overkill 1 day per week to keeping the servers happy. And we'll say the sysadmin makes well over median salary and costs $200k to employ.
For 2 million devices, that's $20k a year in server costs and $40k a year in sysadmin. For 50 years, that's 3 million dollars. So it would take a whole... dollar and a half per purchase to fund 50 years of servers.
Making this subscription-based would be fine, as long as I have my choice of providers. Because then I can run it myself on a raspberry pi or pay a big host a few dollars a year to handle my entire household of devices.
How much do you think a server for config files costs? The true cost is very little here. You can make a server host a million thermostat connections for less than a thousand dollars per year. But let's 10x that to be safe, and have a sysadmin dedicate an overkill 1 day per week to keeping the servers happy. And we'll say the sysadmin makes well over median salary and costs $200k to employ.
For 2 million devices, that's $20k a year in server costs and $40k a year in sysadmin. For 50 years, that's 3 million dollars. So it would take a whole... dollar and a half per purchase to fund 50 years of servers.
Making this subscription-based would be fine, as long as I have my choice of providers. Because then I can run it myself on a raspberry pi or pay a big host a few dollars a year to handle my entire household of devices.