A ransom by any other name
Users of the Futurehome smart ecosystem of lighting, thermostats, smoke detectors, etc. are facing scrapping their entire setup of being forced to pay an annual subscription of approx. £88 for a service that up until now was free.
The company announced in June that all services which used to be included as part of the purchase price of the Smarthub which is used to control the IoT devices will now come under a subscription plan. Users who do not wish to subscribe will lose all ability to control their devices, and any technical support, effectively, bricking the devices.
As expected, the approx. 40K users of the products are not happy – Since the arrival on the market of the Norwegian companies’ products, access to all services, including the cloud platform it runs on was all included in the initial purchase price of the system, now they are being forced to stump up a subscription or have a household of dumb devices. To add insult to injury, the users were only given 4 weeks notice of the move to the subscription plan.
The company recently issued a firmware “upgrade” (downgrade) that locks the devices unless the subscription is paid.
Why the sudden money-grab?
In a post on it’s website – Futurehome states that the the reason for the introduction of the subscription was that the company was declared bankrupt in May 2025, and all assets were purchased by the new owners (a partnership between former Futurehome owners and Sikom Connect), and that to secure stable operation, to fund product development, and to provide ongoing support, they need to introduce the subscription.
In all honesty – this absolutely stinks – If your business model relies solely on the initial purchace price of your goods, then you either need to a) make them cheap enough, with a USP to encourage huge uptake by customers, or price them at the upper end to create an exclusivity that customers will want (see Phillips Hue for how to do this). You cannot sell something and then at some arbitrary point in the future decide you screwed up and you now need more money to continue, so hold customers to ransom for goods they have already bought in good faith.
A class-action lawsuit seems to be somewhere in Futurehomes’ future I suspect, and I also suspect that Futurehome will haemorrhage a large number of its existing users for such awful business practice.
All is not lost (yet)
Adrian Jagielak, a software developer has produced a HomeAssistant solution to the ransomed devices that allows users to regain control of their systems – The solution can be found on his GitHub page
However, this may be short-lived as to further compound the issue, the company has also said that it “cannot guarantee that there will not be changes in the future” around local API access – meaning that those home-brew users who integrate their IoT via platforms via HomeAssistant, are also going to be left with unusable devices.
