Roomba 800 Series

I wish a class action could be won when a product gets bricked by its manufacturer, but "intentionally obsolete" is just the name of the game with cloud- and app-connected devices. You agreed to the service eventually being killed when you first powered the thing on. If you'd declined those terms, it wouldn't have worked on day one. I don't see a way out. No manufacturer is going to run that infrastructure forever ... it isn't financially feasible. They almost certainly did the math up front: sell X units at Y price, fund Z years of server costs. Once Z runs out, they either pull the plug or start losing money, and no company is going to choose the latter. That's just how business works. Any consumer buying an app-connected product and expecting it to last forever is kind of lying to themselves. The majority of customers "upgrade" for no real reason anyway ... most phones get traded in long before their software support ends. You and I are the absolute minority here. iRobot doesn't care about the 1–2% of us complaining that a 10-year-old product just went dark; they care about the 98% buying something new today. The only real ways out of this mess are: 1) the manufacturer isn't an as*hole and lets users self-host once the servers are sunset, or 2) they charge an ongoing fee to keep the lights on for as long as customers are willing to pay. There's a legal case to be made for option 1 ... Louis Rossmann and his organization are fighting exactly that fight, and I wish them the best. In the meantime, the only thing the rest of us can do is vote with our wallets and back legislation that pushes things in that direction.

Nobody is arguing companies deserve perpetual returns on a sale, that is literally why they pull the plug, they aren't making money on it anymore. Cloud infrastructure isn't a one-time cost. AWS, GCP, and Azure all bill monthly for compute, storage, bandwidth, and certificate renewals. On top of that, old codebases need engineers to keep them patched against modern security threats. The unit economics of supporting a $100 device with cloud services for 10 to 15 years just don't work without a subscription model. This is why we keep seeing the same story. Google and Nest killed Revolv hubs in 2016, bricking the devices about 18 months after acquiring the company. Google shut down Stadia in 2023, two years after launch. Spotify killed Car Thing in 2024, refunded some customers, and rendered the hardware useless. Sonos tried to push older speakers into "Recycle Mode" (literal e-waste) before public backlash forced them to walk it back. Pebble only kept functioning because Rebble, a community project, reverse-engineered the backend after Fitbit shut it down. The pattern isn't "companies are evil", its that the math stops working at some point, and the question is what they choose to do about it. That said, you are 100% right on transparency. Support windows should be on the box, full stop: "ROOMBA MODEL XYZ - 10 YEARS OF CLOUD SERVICE INCLUDED". There should be regulation requiring manufacturers to state an intended support period at the point of sale. The EU is already moving in that direction with right-to-repair and ecodesign rules, and the US should follow. And when a product does reach EOL, the right move is to release a self-host path or open-source the server side so the device keeps working locally. That is the part where I lose patience, bricking a device you could just unlock is a choice, not an economic necessity. I run AWS infrastructure for my own business, so I get why a hosting bill on legacy devices is brutal. But there is a huge difference between "we can't afford to host this anymore" and "we're going to deliberately destroy something a customer paid for". The first is reality. The second is a policy decision, and that is where the criticism should land.

"Sunk cost" doesn't mean what you're using it to mean. A sunk cost is money already spent that can't be recovered, like the R&D and tooling that went into designing the Roomba. Cloud hosting isn't that. It's an ongoing operating expense, billed monthly by AWS for as long as the servers stay on. You can't "factor in" 10-15 years of monthly AWS bills into a one-time $300 sale price. The math doesn't close. A $300 device at a 30% margin gives the company maybe $90 in gross profit. Cloud infrastructure for a fleet of millions of devices is real money every month: compute, storage, bandwidth, certificate renewals, plus engineering salaries to keep it patched against new vulnerabilities and so on ... Spread across the install base it might be pennies per device per month, sure, but pennies per month for 15 years on a one-time sale eventually goes negative... That's exactly why every cloud-dependent product either moves to a subscription, sets a support window, or eventually hits the wall. This isn't a controversial point in finance ... If "factored it in at design" actually worked, Revolv wouldn't have died 18 months after Google bought Nest. Stadia, which actually had paying subscribers, wouldn't have died in two years. Car Thing wouldn't be a paperweight. These companies all factored it in at design time. The ongoing costs caught up anyway. I'm not defending bricking devices. That's still a policy choice and the wrong one. The fix is what we already agree on: state a support window on the box, and release a local-host or open-source path at EOL. But the framing that hosting was "already paid for at point of sale" isn't how any of this works financially, and starting from that premise is what gets us toothless consumer-protection laws instead of useful ones tbh .... I sound like I'm repeating myself because you're circling back to the same issue and not addressing anything new or meaningful if I'm being honest...

No ai but OK, my argument is 100% for the consumer as I mentioned MANY times over. But expecting a company to support 10+ year old products FOREVER ... is meaningless. It'll NEVER happen! We can keep dreaming about it, but it will simply NOT happen - with ANY product. The best we can get is if they open-source the back-end when they sunset their cloud services ... Its really not that hard to understand from a financial perspective. Your $300-400 robot vac is NOT going to be "app connected" for 50 years. That's fantasy man ... pure fantasy! I just think they NEED to be clear about how "LONG" such services will last for ... it needs to be written on the box of the product when you buy it "10 years of app support", or whatever. Anyways, if you truly think they should support their vacs forever, please find me another company that currently does that.... ALL connected products WILL die! I just hope they die gracefully where we can still use them properly.

Where did you see me disagree with you on that? I've literally repeated it many times that THERE MUST BE SOME LAW to protect consumers from servers going down. My whole argument is - buying an internet connected device and then complaining about it when its cloud is finally sunset is kind of funny.... anyone with any level of technical knowledge should know that app-controlled devices die eventually. I have a Roomba 800 series that's more than 10 years old, the app support died, but guess what? I can walk up to it, hit the button, and it goes! Cleans just fine. I just looked up the 980 and it seems like it can still be controlled offline ... start/stop/return to base/pause ... so I can't really agree that the product is TRULY dead or useless ... it still cleans up your place (yeah its annoying now that you have to actually walk up to it) ... I guess the 980 had cameras and mapping ability and what not on the app - I get that. But is it TRULY dead as a vac though when the app is gone? It can still use the mapping in real time to navigate on its firmware. Anyways, I am NOT defending iRobot, you can think what you want. I'm not setting up any straw man nonsense. I am simply advocating that people start support the consumer rights wiki and help find solutions - iRobot isn't going to do anything. Vote with your dollars and move on. I recently bought an Ecovac as well, and I fully expect its cloud to die eventually...