Smart home company Wink to require users pay a $4.99 monthly subscription fee starting May 13, or device automations and accessibility via app will be disabled
Smart home company Wink has made a surprising and heavily criticized announcement: it will soon charge a monthly subscription fee.
SlashGearBrittany A. Roston
Context & Ripple Effects
Wink built its brand on cheap, one-time-purchase hubs — the $99 Wink Hub 2 was pitched as a simpler, more secure smart home brain — but its track record with owners has been rough, from a launch where products didn't work as advertised to a bad software update that bricked many hubs. Now the company is converting that installed base into a revenue line: pay $4.99 a month starting May 13, or lose device automations and app control entirely.
The move prefigures what became an industry pattern: three years later, Ring told new Alarm users that features previously free would sit behind a Ring Protect plan starting at $3.99 a month, and then raised that cheapest tier by 25% to $5. Wink's announcement is the early, blunt version of the same playbook.
First-order effects
Existing Wink hub owners who bought hardware outright face a deadline of May 13: keep paying $4.99 monthly or their automations and app-based control stop working, turning owned devices into functionally dependent ones.
Wink absorbs immediate reputational damage — the announcement is described as heavily criticized — on top of lingering distrust from the 2015 update failures and unmet simplicity promises.
Second-order effects
Rivals gain a differentiation lever: marketing no-subscription local control becomes a direct counter-position against Wink, and the backlash gives competitors a ready-made argument for their own pricing.
Ring's subsequent moves — paywalling free features for new Alarm users, then a 25% price hike on the cheapest tier — show the knock-on effect normalizing: once one vendor proves users will accept retroactive fees, others test how far the same lever goes.
Third-order effects
If the pattern holds, smart home economics structurally shift from sell-hardware-once to rent-access-forever, with cloud dependence as the enforcement mechanism — buyers effectively lease the continued functionality of devices they already own.
That shift raises a durable trust problem for the category: every retroactive paywall makes consumers discount the long-term value of any cloud-tethered device, pushing demand toward products whose core functions survive without a vendor's servers or a subscription.
The trend: Smart home vendors are converting one-time hardware purchases into recurring subscriptions, using cloud-dependent features as the lever — Wink's 2020 fee was an early data point that Ring's later paywalls and price hikes extended.
Hey @TheWinkApp, this is bullsh*t...you tell us that in *one week* our app will stop working unless we pay for your sub? That's not a sub, that's a ransom. It will cost me more to move away than to sub, but I'm gone. Asshole move during a pandemic, too. https://blog.wink.com/...
This is why I won't go near a “smart” home device. https://blog.wink.com/... That device you bought a few years back? Now you will have to pay a monthly subscription to keep it working.
Wow. @TheWinkApp pulls *major* bait-and-switch, telling customers their hardware will no longer work if they don't sign up for a subscription service (which the hardware was not contingent on when purchasing). That's a company that deserves to go under. https://www.slashgear.com/…
So my @theWinkApp hub is going to become a paperweight with ONE WEEK notice during a period where I can't exactly go out and obtain an alternative? No grace period or free trial? That's pretty unbelievable. @WinkSupport https://blog.wink.com/...
Pro tip: If you keep your home dumb, you'll actually be able to use the stuff in it without paying rent to an app developer (until they decide to abandon you and brick your equipment). https://twitter.com/...
This is serious bullshit. I invested in my smart devices on the basis of it being a 1-time charge. Now, out of the blue, @TheWinkApp is implementing a fee structure with 1 week notice. Guess I'm going back to light switches Introducing Wink Subscription https://blog.wink.com/...
Absolutely stunned that #Wink did this. I'll be buying a Homeseer now that this has happened to me twice. Wink isn't even all that good. I get the need to make money, but 7 days notice? https://www.slashgear.com/...
Wait, you're going to hold all my wi-fi switches, outlet strips, and light bulbs hostage for $5/mo.? The ones I took a chance on 5 years ago, surviving many interruptions and even a bricked Wink Hub? Introducing Wink Subscription https://blog.wink.com/...