My partner has difficulty sleep unless it is the perfect environment (black out curtains, noise cancellation, sound bath, temperature), and is more prone to the effects of a single bad nights sleep. For people like her, $20/mo + $2000 fee is a small price to pay for a solution to a very difficult problem.
I would of course, attempt to veto unnecessary IoT devices and subscriptions for usage, but this would be a fight I would likely not win.
They're not complaining about the price. They're complaining about the high price for a bed where those high priced features stop working if your internet goes down, or there is a server outage, or you stop paying a monthly fee, or the original company goes bankrupt.
How in the world does this necessitate a subscription? All of these things can work without centralization, setup once, and contained entirely within the home.
> How in the world does this necessitate a subscription?
I can only speculate.
But, there is demand to improve sleep quality. The provider wants to charge a monthly fee for that.
The market simply puts buys and sellers together. People making business decisions will stick with Econ 101--charge what the market will bare, and why shouldn't they?
I think there is some naming convention gap here. I would call it Sleep Equipment as we have exercise equipments. Then folks will find pricing more reasonable. There is further opportunity to differentiate market with Sleep, Sleep Pro and Sleep Enterprise products.
The pro and enterprise version would allow local server setup for critical sleep equipment functioning and can manage all beds in a household or hotel etc . It can update the version of software or data models when its online and new features are available on cloud server.
I surmise at 300 dollar/month for pro version could be really attractive proposition. Of course local server setup and maintenance can be charged separately.
How easy is it to know what works when the network is down before purchasing? Do you expect everyone to take down their wifi after purchase to test and return if it doesn't work?
Maybe there should be a mandatory information sheet such as listing all functionality that stops working without a network connection.
Consumer protection regulation with mandatory labeling would be a good answer but, at least in the US, we're not going to have anything like that anytime soon (if ever).
I don't have the enthusiasm to start a competing company. It sounds like the barrier to entry to the market is fairly low, the tech isn't unproven, and there appears to be a ton of margin.
