Wink 2 Replacement Hub

I got an email this morning that starting May 13th, Wink will now charge $4.99/month to use their hub. Blah. The whole point of buying a wink hub on the first place was to not have a monthly fee.

I’m thinking about switching to another hub, possibly the SmartThings hub or something else. I have several GE Zwave switches, dimmer, and fan controllers; echo dot; several WeMo switches and plugs; a single temperature/motion sensor (Smart+ by Sylvania) and a few SmartLife switches. I don’t believe any of these are HomeKit compatible. I have the Wink hub paired with the Echo Dot for voice control.

Any suggestions on a new hub? Anyone have experience with the SmartThings hub?

I have never used Wink, but I presume they provide online service of some sort. Providing online service is not free. It’s dumb that they tried the free route to begin with, IMHO. If you decide to spend $120 on a new hub, remember that is also 2 years of service from the one you already have working. Not to put too fine of a point on it, but “support your devs.” Anything free is probably worth exactly what you pay for it.

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This article from Kevin Tofel may help.

There are many other good articles over there on other hubs, and of course listening to the the Stacey on IoT podcast keeps you up to date on the fragile IoT landscape.

Myself I’d go for the mostly roll-your-own WebThings Gateway from Mozilla


or the Hubitat system.

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