Rachio or Rainmachine

Question for Rachio users out there - are you at all concerned that Rachio changes their cloud access to a subscription model? One of the key distinguishing characteristics (at least from what I’ve seen) is that Rainmachine is open source on AWS whereas Rachio is propriety (also on AWS?). Some reviewers have pointed out the risk of cloud access being flipped to a subscription model.

Anyone have real-world experience of the Weather dependent (FLEX) functionality of both?

Thanks!

My water bill went down by ~$60 / month after I’ve installed my controller years ago. Should major changes occur which would make me rethink being a member (such as company going out of business or a sudden huge charge for cloud access without corresponding additional features), my controller has already paid for itself several times over. ROI of Rachio is very short, in part due to there being no monthly fee.

Rainmachine is not completely open, the source code, as far as I can tell, is only available for their basic 8 output model (similar as if Rachio decided to release source for Gen 1 controller), and they only claim that their API and evaporation formula will be open sourced (so is Rachio for that matter as far as API). Reason they’ve released the source code at all, appears to be due to Linux license of the distribution that they’ve used as a base of their first controller. I don’t force the source code of newer models to be made available at this point.

Should rainmaker go under, or decide to start charging for services on their latest controllers, the open source community will be ill equipped to keep the services active.

I may be wrong in my analysis, I welcome any feedback from those more knowledgeable.

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The day has come that Rainmachine is requiring their “Premium Service” subscription of $30 per month. That along with the fact that their updates come at once or maybe twice a year and their customer service is actually getting slower to respond is the reason I am looking to change to Rachio. Also, Rainmachine has not had controllers to sell for many months so seems to me that they are going under.