It does seem that way, however, in none of the AdaBoxes I've gotten from them have I had to sign up for their cloud services. That's where you think they would push it hard, but it just hasn't happened and I'm glad for that. There are usually a few samples that make use, but you always have the option to roll your own code on it and use their base libraries for interfacing with the hardware. It will be a sad (and probably disastrous) day when they bind their code to require cloud services especially considering some micros don't have wifi.