Source: indieblog.page daily random posts
Wyze’s trajectory from beloved affordable option to abandoned product represents a broader pattern where companies use low prices to capture market share, then degrade service (removing features, forcing cloud dependency, degrading reliability) to drive upgrades or monetization—pushing users toward open-source alternatives like Thingino that restore actual ownership. This accelerates the “enshittification cycle” and reveals a fundamental misalignment: consumers want durable, autonomous hardware; venture-backed companies need recurring revenue and data extraction. The fact that users must now hack their own cameras with custom firmware and self-hosted Telegram bots to get basic functionality suggests the real product shift wasn’t technical but philosophical—from selling cameras to selling subscriptions, and users are finally voting with their time and attention.