If you don’t pay a subscription you can’t see the history of use, it’s limited to the latest 5 events. When I bought the ten devices (=I paid 150 euro for the hardware), it was 100 events
Just like how BMW and Tesla made basic car features a subscription, soon phone and hardware companies will make some features a subscription as well. People need to stop being sheep and stop buying products from such companies, but the way it is now, it’s too high an expectation.
Everyone recommend HomeAssistant and it’s great. An alternative that’s easier to implement if you’re using Apple HomeKit (on HomePod or Apple TV) is HomeBridge. It’s super easy to setup and becomes a bridge to make anything compatible HomeKit.
you may be interested in the open-source "Home Assistant". it's a free home automation hub thingy that supports practically every brand and protocol out there, including Shelly. if you're technical enough to set it up, free yourself from proprietary apps!
Whether or not the price is right is another discussion, but I will point out that they’re not charging for you to see the events. Like you said, there’s a web server and API for that. They’re charging you for them to store the history and serve it up on demand, which does have ongoing costs and I understand not accepting a one-time purchase for.
If you want history, hook into the API with Home Assistant or Grafana or something and store it yourself. It’s either that or pay them to store it. Infrastructure that stores and serves up the history doesn’t come from nowhere, and an ongoing cost for an ongoing service kinda makes sense.
I think 100 dollars is more than enough money to cover a few bytes of text storage. It’s not like they are storing megabytes of tracking meta data. And if they are that’s even more reason to provide the service for free.
I flashed mine over 12 months ago and haven’t had any issues since. I had noticed there hadn’t been any updates but didn’t realise he’d stopped working on it.
Mate, I flash my Shellys with esphome and just use them locally in Home Assistant. Or, you could flash them with Tasmota and use the built-in webserver on each device to configure automations.
HA has gotten a lot better in the last year if you haven’t used it in a while. I honestly don’t feel it’s cumbersome. Gone are the days of needing to use YAML code.
HomeAssistant is not cumbersome in the slightest. The only issue is that you have to set it up yourself, so if you do it poorly then it’s cumbersome. People post beautiful dashboards and automation blueprints daily multiple places around the internet.
Honestly the most mildly infuriating thing is that you have this whole bunch of devices tightly integrated with an easy local solution and you decided to use their cloud app. You never use the cloud app! It’s always a trap. I don’t even use the Nabu Casa cloud stuff from HA.
I’m sorry, but it really is. I’m a developer and have been in IT for years and it was still one of the most complex apps I’ve ever dealt with. It’s up and running now, but not without dozens of hours of tinkering, trial and error, weird niche forums, thousands of reddit and stack overflow posts, and honestly learning python
must have been a while since you used HA, i have everything set up without writing a single line of code whatsoever. no custom YAML, no custom python, everything done 100% from the GUI. getting my shelly devices in HA was just as easy as getting them in the Shelly app. I installed the shelly integration (pure GUI from within HA itself, took me 30sec) and all devices were auto-discovered.
Oh it’s super cumbersome and a huge pain in the ass to set up. I say this as someone who has been using it for years in my house.
Doing any setup in HA just feels like pulling teeth, even something as simple as a timer is far more complex than it should be.
Once it’s all set up it looks nice and generally works great, my only complaint is the mobile app loads slow, it takes like a second to display the dash after it opens.
At the moment of purchase one year ago they had an open API and a webserver on each relay to use them without apps (they still have it… for now?). I could just type the relay IP address on my browser and control it without proprietary apps.
I loved this openness so much that I put them everywhere in my house. Then this surprise update came today on my phone…
I see, typical trap from this fuckers. You can use this as an opportunity to learn to flash firmwares to things and to not trust proprietary software, specially nothing in the cloud for your home automation
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