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Comment by bitexploder | Hacker News Reader

The convenience is great, but I agree. Age has taught me these giant tech companies cannot be stewards of knowledge. The public library system is incredibly important, and under political attack, alas that is a separate discussion. Regardless paper books are a great equalizer. Or companies accepting and ditching DRM. Regardless I have zero moral problems removing DRM from my book libraries on Kindle, etc.

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It’s not just the giant companies. I had good experience with YI cameras from Kami and so I purchased about 7 of them. Suddenly they decided to go to a subscription model, and sent me an email

“After years of growing, we are at the point that our systems can no longer support free 6 second video storage for all our users”

I proceeded to remove the cameras and replaced them with on site NVR. After I did this I receive another email-

“ WE ARE SORRY.

Due to a system error, we sent you an email by mistake expressing that we will no longer support free 6 second video for the Yi/Kami Home app. Do not worry, you will still have this feature.”

Too late. I also find myself moving away from subscription based types of experience whenever I can, where the company can just remove feature or content at will. I wonder if there is a name in marketing circles for this behavior.

In my mind, I stay away from subscriptions if there are any physical assets or up-front costs involved. Kagi is a good example of a reasonable subscription model. Up-front costs are where companies can really screw you and take advantage of the sunk cost fallacy. That's where I got screwed by Nest. I spent $400 on their cameras, which worked great until Google bought them. After that, no more free storage, the AI automatic object detection went to absolute crap, I have constant authentication issues where the original Nest account and the Google account keep signing each other out, and now I'm stuck with these cameras.

Hi, I also have a Kami camera, and was entertaining the idea of going off the path with maybe an alternative provider, or just a self-hosted solution. Could you let me know about your new setup?

I was wondering if these cameras are locked-in with the Kami cloud vendor solution, or they use a standard protocol thus trivial to move to another provider, or just something in between those two extremes...

I went to the 4k wired nvr, by Lorex. Upgradebale self hosted etc. it came with 9 or 10 cameras but I only installed 5

Ah yes, “system error”.

I'm sorry, this person stumbled and happened to land with their chest directly on the tip of my knife which I was holding in my hand.

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