Wink discovers business model doesn’t work, wants to get income on 4 million connected devices
Yesterday Wink posted to their blog that they’re going to be transitioning from a one-time fee gathered with the purchase of a device to a nearly $60 a year subscription model effective May 13th.
If you don’t agree to pay, all your Wink devices are useless starting in about a week.
The one week notice should irk you, as well as the attempt to claim that cloud computing costs for their back end could possibly necessitate a $5 a month per user cost.
Oh, I’m sure they’re potentially blowing upwards of $40,000 a month on cloud computing rental.. which would be covered by a user base of about 8000.
4 million connected devices, per their blog post probably means they have a user base of around 400,000-800,000 as I don’t think most people will have more than 10 connected devices.
So Wink is attempting to create an income stream of about $2-$4 million a month and telling you your devices are junk in a week if you don’t want to play, with no offers of refunds for people who bought them in the past week or two expecting the service that had been offered and advertised.
And they gave you a week to chuck your Wink devices or pay up.
Class act Wink, class act. Perhaps class action.
[Wink Blog via Ray] (Thanks Ray!)
