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Good news and bad news.following Insteon goes bankruptwhich resulted in the sudden shutdown of their servers and the bricking of many users’ systems, the company has now Acquired by a group of passionate Insteon users.
When I say enthusiastic users, new CEO Ken Fairbanks worked at SmartLabs from 2004 to 2007 before being acquired by a private equity group.
The new company, Insteon Technologies, is now working to bring the servers back online, which will allow Insteon Hubs to get to work. The process has already begun, and many users can now use their hubs again.
They also have websites, email service providers, social accounts and various other online necessities that will allow the company to start communicating and providing support to users.
Insteon Technologies has confirmed that not all features are back online, but they are working to bring them back.
Subscription fee
However, the new owners did not buy the company out of good intentions. At the very least, they need to recoup their investment and cover operating costs.
I think hardware sales have leveled off, but it looks like they’re working hard to get back to selling and manufacturing.So the only solution is Implement subscription-based services to cover the cost of running all services. This should allow the company to separate the Insteon Hub service aspect of the business from sales, which should in theory avoid repeating previous issues.
Insteon plans to implement an annual subscription fee of $39.95, or $69.95 for two years.
It looks like the company will roll out this feature in the next few weeks.
Be careful if you don’t plan to pay a subscription fee
Posted by a Reddit user Pretty important PSA about these new subscription fees. Until Insteon clarifies Insteon’s long-term plans, users don’t know what changes Insteon might make to Insteon Hubs.
Many if not most users use home assistant, Homeseer, and other third-party services that use native API access to communicate with the hub. Insteon is likely to roll out a firmware update that disables native API access without a subscription. It seems like they’d be humiliating themselves by losing the trust of all their current customers, but I’ve seen companies do worse.
If you wish to avoid this possibility, Reddit users suggest that you should remove all schedules from the Insteon app, and then block all incoming and outgoing traffic from the hub to the Internet. You should be able to do this by finding its IP address and then blocking it in your router. You also need to make sure the hub has a static IP address, you can do this on the hub itself, or you can usually keep the IP in the router settings.
You can also try blocking prod.insteon.pubnub.com.
comprehensive
I don’t use Insteon, so I’m not sure how much this will affect the overall. If you are willing to pay for the service, all is well.
I’m assuming anyone still using Insteon is using PLMS or Home Assistant. Anyone else may have migrated to the new system. This may not necessarily be good news for Home Assistant/Homeseer users, depending on how Insteon tries and advances the business and whether they make changes to how the hub works.
