what, if any, functionality would be lost if Rachio’s cloud server went down or Rachio went out of business?
If the cloud server went down you could not send commands to your controller. Any scheduled schedules would continue to run. In 5 years we’ve never had an outage more than maybe a few minutes.
We’ve been in business for quiet some time, but one of the risks you take with a cloud connected device is continuous server availability if the company is no longer around.
The only true non-cloud controller I know of is the RainMachine. If the above is your main concern I’d go with them. You will miss out on all the sophisticated weather intelligence, “flexible” (i.e. dynamic) schedule types, and numerous integrations (i.e. Google Assistant, Alexa, SmartThings, etc.) we provide though.
Hope this helps.
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Lack of continued development is a death sentence for any smart device, cloud based or otherwise.
Having never used RainMachine, I can’t say how much more or less I could be saving on my water bills each month, but having considered them prior to choosing Rachio I can definitely say that Rachio has made the installation and setup more straightforward and allowed me to keep the controller outside.
Savings are relative, is it possible that Rachio’s servers will go dark? Seems to me this is unlikely. Judging by the reviews and the most active community of any controller, one of the big boys (Like Google, Amazon or Apple) will likely buy the company in case the owners ever decide (or need) to sell.
I wouldn’t worry about possibly loosing some functionality down the road, instead I would ask how much is your time worth to setup your system in the most economical way and start saving the most money on your water bills as soon as possible.
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The Rachio sprinkler controller is the Mercedes Benz of all smart sprinkler controllers I have been using Rachio since 2014 Rachio have saved me hundreds of dollars 
on my water 
bill and there’s only more room to improve there’s no other sprinkler controller that can come close to Rachio all the features and the capability the Rachio offers are limitless and the best is yet to come.
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thanks all. this isn’t necessarily a big issue for me. just one thing i wanted to know. i’m putting in underground sprinklers from scratch.
I will add to the above sentiments. I am new to Rachio, but already my controller has saved me more money in water than it cost. I will add that at least for me it does take some time to learn and really understand how this works. I had to purchase a new irrigation controller due to the failure of my previous controller and went to Amazon looking to see what was available, without even knowing Rachio existed. Searching for controllers, I found Rachio and with all the great reviews I purchased one without understanding how special Rachio is. At first, I set my Rachio gen 2 up the way my old controller was set, that is to water Monday, Wednesday, and Friday with a set number of minutes per zone, but with the added future looking weather intelligence (instead of a backward looking rain sensor), but I quickly realized that with the weather intelligence I was getting that my Rachio had capabilities that went much farther than such fixed schedules. Should Rachio no longer exist to support the cloud servers, I will be very disappointed, but I will have not wasted any money; I will have saved a lot of money, and if that should ever happen I will just have to find another controller to use.
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