When I open the app I’m constantly seeing “shop now” ads that I have to dismiss.
Since I already paid for the product I don’t think I should.
How do I permanently remove these?
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I do not know of a way to get rid of the ads in this or other applications. I know some do not agree, but I personally would rather get ads than to pay a subscription.
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This business model is used by many companies as I mentioned in the previous message. This is especially true when hardware is sold that really does not seem to get changed out very often. They always have upkeep costs with apps, website, and other interfaces. So, it is usually either ads or subscription.
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Rachio is already a paid service. The controller isn’t cheap. It’s just a cash grab, right or wrong.
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I have no idea what their margins are on hardware, but the monthly upkeep on servers and whatnot for the service has to be spendy. I’ve been using Rachio units for almost 8 years for free. If I was using the competitor Rainmachine, that would have cost me $240 in that time for the “premium services” subscription, which I don’t pay for with Rachio. Although, I can’t figure out if Rainmachine is still in existence since all their products show Discontinued and haven’t been available in forever…
As long as they aren’t pimping products based on my recent Google searches, and it stays confined to Rachio products and its affiliates (wink wink @franz), why is that a problem?
Not hard to bake server costs into upfront hardware costs. The ads are definitely annoying. By the way, the code is already written and the hardware itself is insanely cheap. PCB’s and plastic aren’t expensive to mass produce.
Also, not really sure I understand your math. $240 over 8 years. Is that a lot? I’d gladly pay that for no ads.
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For how long? 2 years? 5 years? 10 years? Again, it is literally a Rachio sold product. I personally don’t see the issue, but sorry that it bothers you so much. That’s unfortunate.
Never said it did or did not bother me (to the point I’d ditch the Rachio controller). It’s irrelevant either way.
Just observing that the unit list price is more than enough to cover the cost of the physical controller and the accompanying software code. In fact the code is just pure profit at this point.
What server costs are you even referring to? 99% of the controller and app functionality are executed locally, the cost borne by the client.
The controller only fires the valves and can store a couple weeks worth of scheduling. ALL the lifting is done in the cloud. When you mingle around in the app, you aren’t talking directly with the controller at all. You are talking to the servers in the cloud, which then tell the controller what to do.
The “cloud” is only serving weather data, which is being polled from a third-party source. It’s not a very resource-intensive process. Calculations are done on-hardware. I’d be surprised if they weren’t, but even if they weren’t, it’s a binary event. Water, or don’t water.
By way of example, at Weatherstack, its $10/month for 50000 API calls/month for all the real-time weather data you could ever imagine. Factor in that via economies of scale, Rachio are not making these API calls on a per/client basis. Rather, they’re doing them maybe a handful of times per region, then disseminating the exact same info to all of its clients in the region.
Lastly, this project exists elsewhere, at a similar cost - no subscriber fees either. It’s based on the Raspberry Pi and is called OpenSprinkler.
I believe the cost of OpenSprinkler more accurately reflects Rachio’s true costs.
I mean, you are wrong, but you’ve got the math all dialed in on what Rachios cost must be…
The hardware takes what it is given from the cloud and fires the solenoids. You sre looking at this as a basic fized schedule system, but look outside that at the nore complex schedules of Flex Monthly or Flex Daily. None of calcularions of crop ET, and need for water are done on hardware. None of the season shifts are calculated on the hardware. Fixed schedules are about the only thing that can run indefinitely without the cloud, but you lose the weathwr intelligence.
And im sorry, but to compare a Rasberry Pi product to a consumer/pro grade solution is almost laughable. Raspberry Pi, and things it can do is amazing and the stuff you can run on it is expansive, but not the same.
I was very specific in my verbiage to see if it would elicit a more quantitative response that might indicate you’ve got experience with anything I was referring to.
It’s clear you don’t. It’s clear you’re bs’ing.
P.S. - the RPi probably has has an order of magnitude more computing power than whatever Chinese PCB is in the Rachio.
No, I just stopped reading since you continue to believe that all the work is done on the local controller and Rachio has no need servers in the cloud handling the heavily lifting and passing it down.
And I never once said RPi wasn’t powerful. I said it wasn’t a consumer level product since it takes a lot of technical knowhow in most applications.
I’m happy to continue the conversation if you can provide us with something a little more quantitative than just, “monthly upkeep on servers and whatnot for the service has to be spendy”.
I’ve already demonstrated that polling real-time weather data and batch dissemination is very low overhead, to the point it can be done by a “consumer/pro” (prosumer?) for zero cost (250 API calls/month at Weathercast is free).
It really doesn’t matter where the “calculations” are being made (themselves likely just based on standard, known scheduling algorithms). You might even be right in that they’re done server-side. This would allow Rachio to put an even cheaper PCB into the controller than already exists, thus increasing their profit margins further.
The ads aren’t necessary.
Good day.
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Weil, you’re not happy in any sense. You’re just not making sense nor meaningful conversation. I can vouch for @tmcgahey and @Thomas_Lerman as very knowledgeable, thorough, and best of all generous with their long-term knowledge of the Rachio ecosystem. Your apparent vendetta with Rachio aside, it’s saved me more money for water than I ever imagined possible (some of my neighbors too). It takes some experience and patience to dial-in an irrigation controller capable of adapting to the vagaries of the weather in your own particular corner of the world. Snarling at the residents of this community won’t get it done.
If you’ve already got it all figured out… go for it.
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Sorry that other business models do it doesn’t make this OK. There are thousands of ways to create continued revenue. Ads is the laziest way. Give us a way to turn them off please.
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Vendetta? Who? I don’t know who these people are. I don’t know who you are. I just got here, and I can spot a bullish*ter when I see one. Especially because I’ve written code that does exactly what the Rachio does and then some, except the data is from FlightAware.
I’m sorry your friend made a baseless claim about “spendy” server costs.
I’ll take the ad hominem as meaning you have no rebuttal.
FWIW, I have a Rachio and I do like it, minus frequent wifi drops. The ads are annoying, but not to the point I’ll throw the device away. I guess I’ll just stick to the webapp, where I don’t see any ads.