> How about providing a single board computer like a Raspberry Pi

The issue is more about connection to external servers than the particular board itself. A product that both runs great out of the box, and is also hackable to the point where it doesn't 100% rely on the original company being around to run is the sweet spot I'm thinking of. I'm mostly just thinking aloud about what features the product needs to have in order to hit that sweet spot.

> That said, I'm not buying any IoT devices, self-hosted or not, in the foreseeable future

That's cool, but this isn't about the average HN user. Consumers want to, and indeed they do, pay for these devices. I just want a nice model where these products can be sold while not leaving the customer stuck if the original company goes under.

> The issue is more about connection to external servers than the particular board itself.

Oh I meant that the R.Pi would be the server where the IoT gadgets connect to. Located in your home and available through your home network connection. Optionally with some kind of (self-hosted) server in your own VPS.

This is obviously a solution for DIY-ers only.

> Consumers want to, and indeed they do, pay for these devices.

I don't think this will ever work if the customers pay for the devices but not for the service. A $99 gadget doesn't leave much for the company to be running the service. I don't see how the economics would work out without a recurring payment.

My gut feeling is that gadget startups such as this one haven't even thought about surviving more than 3-5 years without being acqui-hired to a major corp. Some may bet on getting to be big and thinking that scale will help.

But even if every darn garage in the world would have this gadget for the $99 they charge, I can't see how they can keep the servers running and the software up-to-date with a one time purchase for the life expectancy of an average garage door.

But consumers complain about recurring fees and there's only so many services you can subscribe to. Paying $2-$10 a month for your garage door, thermostat, cat feeder, plant waterer, etc will add up to a lot of money and hassle.

The only way I see forward with cloud-powered IoT gadgets is that a major company with billions of dollars sets up the infrastructure that will scale up to millions of users with a few billion gadgets (and a monthly fee). It's either that or self-hosted DIY. I don't think it's economically viable for a start-up to provide a cloud service for a one-time fee for any meaningful period of time.

I'm sure customers don't want to buy and install a new garage door opener every 3 years when their previous IoT gadget startup goes belly up, servers go down and the gadget turns to a brick.

Ahh I see what you mean about the Pi now. If only consumers were satisfied with a LAN-only IoT device...

As for server costs, I think you could get away with something pretty low cost if you trim down what you offer to essentially just a message broker that runs on a handful of machines. Depends on what kind of data the device works with. A camera would cost a lot in bandwidth. A garage door opener, not so much.

If IPV6 were more widespread I suppose the issue of connecting apps to devices would be more straightforward but as it is now you pretty much need a third party server if you want to control your devices remotely. But for a small team handling thousands or tens of thousands of these devices, I think your server costs wouldn't amount to much. If your product becomes big you could start launching other things to sell and reuse the infrastructure you have. At least, that's how I hope it would go down :)