APP controls for Smartphones

[aessec]

What do we think about charging for the APP use to clients, Risco, Eaton is Free both APP & Cloud, HKC charge for both APP & Cloud, Pyronix has Free APP & free Cloud 1st year, then annual subscription, Texecom charge for APP but it uses client direct web connection and needs a degree to programme. Current we include the feature in the annual maintenance agreement, but where clients do not renew which is getting more and more common, we charge, additionally most of the APPS are based on clients broadband, when that faulters from time to time as they do, they want us to fix FOC, thoughts gratefully appreciated

[PeterJames]

Hi have you applied for trade yet?

 

I think most of the free ones are, or will, soon be charging, it costs money to run and up keep a cloud server. Like everything in this world in order for someone to get something for nothing, someone else got nothing for something.

 

We have always used the pay for apps and steered clear of the free apps, think about it if you are relying on it to protect something you care about why would you use something thats free? What come back have you got if it failed to operate? You cant even ask for your money back. 

Dont get me wrong I think out of all the apps Ive seen the Risco one is one of the best. I just dont trust it, mainly because it is or has been free

[james.wilson]

its a valid point re routers being changed. It's definitely a chargeable call.

[al-yeti]

1 hour ago, PeterJames said:

Hi have you applied for trade yet?

 

I think most of the free ones are, or will, soon be charging, it costs money to run and up keep a cloud server. Like everything in this world in order for someone to get something for nothing, someone else got nothing for something.

 

We have always used the pay for apps and steered clear of the free apps, think about it if you are relying on it to protect something you care about why would you use something thats free? What come back have you got if it failed to operate? You cant even ask for your money back. 

Dont get me wrong I think out of all the apps Ive seen the Risco one is one of the best. I just dont trust it, mainly because it is or has been free

You think hikvision will start charging some time soon? 

 

Would be good if they did lol

1 hour ago, PeterJames said:

Risco one is one of the best. I just dont trust it, mainly because it is or has been free

Would you start fitting the agility when they start having to pay?

[PeterJames]

23 minutes ago, al-yeti said:

You think hikvision will start charging some time soon? 

 

Would be good if they did lol

Would you start fitting the agility when they start having to pay?

I think that sooner or later it would be difficult not to charge. They are seeing a slow down in the sales of smart phones, mainly because the phone of this year is not that much better than the phone of two or three years ago. CCTV I think peaked at 2mp anything higher res than that you are just wasting HDD space in most cases. The point of CCTV is to identify and on the whole 2mp does that unless you put the camera on in a stupid place, or you trying to achieve two cameras worth of pictures from one. So sooner or later CCTV sales will start to fall, not everyone in the UK wants CCTV and those who have it will not see the need to upgrade as they do now. So therefore sales will start to drop, and thats when apps will become costly to run, and the cheaper Chinese apps will stop working and the Hiks of this world will have to charge, port forwarding is the safest bet rather than cloud. 

[GalaxyGuy]

6 hours ago, PeterJames said:

I think most of the free ones are, or will, soon be charging, it costs money to run and up keep a cloud server. Like everything in this world in order for someone to get something for nothing, someone else got nothing for something.

 

We have always used the pay for apps and steered clear of the free apps, think about it if you are relying on it to protect something you care about why would you use something thats free? What come back have you got if it failed to operate? You cant even ask for your money back. 

Dont get me wrong I think out of all the apps Ive seen the Risco one is one of the best. I just dont trust it, mainly because it is or has been free

 

I think you will see a couple of business models in play.  The first, a minimal unsupported free / no SLA service that's provided in order to check the box of 'free apps' when customers are selecting the product. The other will be various levels of up-selling the basic offering at a cost. Ie. Where you pay for support and added functionality.  It's pretty much how 'free' software works. 

 

 

[sixwheeledbeast]

Exactly. I don't think free apps will disappear, you will just loose functionality.

I prefer to stick to products that allow me to control all functionality.

You can't ever rely on a cloud service that in it's T&C's has permission to move it's goal posts whenever it feels.

[datadiffusion]

Interestingly SPC charge the installer for SPC Connect webby (www.spcconnect.com) but not the end user!!

 

And the pricing is such that with only a handful of SPC panels it just isn't worth it. It was free for the first year or so IIRC.

 

They have also just added push monitoring to their free app. Be interesting to see if this is before starting to charge. And if so, will it be retrospective?

Edited August 29, 2017 by datadiffusion

[al-yeti]

53 minutes ago, datadiffusion said:

Interestingly SPC charge the installer for SPC Connect webby (www.spcconnect.com) but not the end user!!

 

And the pricing is such that with only a handful of SPC panels it just isn't worth it. It was free for the first year or so IIRC.

 

They have also just added push monitoring to their free app. Be interesting to see if this is before starting to charge. And if so, will it be retrospective?

So installers hands over phone to end user and gets it free either way?

[datadiffusion]

Yes, there is a workaround of sorts. Set up 2nd user using engineers credentials. You just cant see all panels at once.

There is no such thing as an engineer account on the user side of SPCconnect though (if you get me) so you still need

to log into the panels web through the connection the 'forwarded' panel web server the SPCconnect offers to do anything remotely

engineery. This 2nd login needs the regular engineer details so user still has no access.

Edited August 29, 2017 by datadiffusion