Is it common to have to keep buying updates to Polyglot plugins?

I know it's not a whole lot of $$ but I've paid for several that seemed to work for a while and then they break and require complex workarounds that cost money....or simply just don't work anymore.

I thought the benefit of PG and Eisy was that you could easily just connect devices without complexity.

Specifically, I'm talking about the Tesla plugin and Ecobee. I paid for each of these...perpetual licenses, and now they don't work due to API changes but why am I paying for these things that could break at any time without notice?

It kind of sucks but you have to look at it from the developer's perspective when they have to rework the programming because the api keeps changing to try to lock the 3rd party developer's out. I guess you have to decide what is important to you and if you don't want to pay then consider using homeassistant.

Cloud dependant devices (and any related plugins) are always at the mercy of the manufacturer's whim. You gotta accept that from the start.

Got it. I think developers should make it more clear that they could stop working at any time and not call them perpetual.

I literally got one or two days of the Tesla plugin working and then bought the second version which never worked.

It may not be the developers fault but they collected money for something that was supposed to work.

As @Guy Lavoie pointed out, iot manufacturers commonly adopt a "sell once, support forever" business model.. AND.. insist on a cloud API <- I'm not clear why on this part, probably to collect data on us. And then they realize they sold their product once, have no more revenue stream and yet have real costs to operate the infrastructure for their api and fix bugs and security problems.

Or, sometimes plugin developers reverse engineer an iot manufacturers API and get it to work, eg there's no official API. Then one day the manufacturer changes or locks it. I've found UDI plugin developers to be clear about it when they are reverse engineering something.

When the developer has to create the new API to solve the vendor breaking it, they spend real time doing real work to address the problem. And candidly, plugins are a "sell once, support forever" model.

It's a risk of having a home automation system... any of them, not just a UDI product.

Edited 15 hours ago15 hr by paulbates