Following my series “get your stuff organized, for the god sake!” and “wipe those subscription out”, the next victim was IFTTT.
I’ve been using IFTTT for the past 5 years and I was pretty happy with the service until the second semester of the last year when IFTTT decided to implement a professional plan (9.99 USD suggested, but you could decide how much to pay, stating at 1.99 USD).
The Pro Plan
I had about 30 recipes of my own at IFTTT and their free plan would restrict to only 3. You still could use others recipes from IFTTT, but due to my home automation, I had to change to the pro plan.
It was cheap: 1.99 USD per month. Nothing that would change my mind and migrate ALL my automations of IFTTT.
My Home Automation setup was never complex but changing it would mean hours of research and study ahead.
But then other thing happened…
eWelink “VIP” Plan
Most of my home automations uses Sonoff, a cheap and efficient “smart device”. Sonoff devices uses the eWeLink service for controlling and integrating their devices with IFTTT.
eWeLink app was never a very intuitive and beautiful app, but it worked and allowed me to control my devices and integrate them with Google Home (sometimes using the Gooogle Home integration, sometimes using IFTTT recipes for automation).
And then eWeLink decided to revamp its app. It became quite beautiful and more functional, but it also came with a VIP plan for about $10/year (and all of their IFTTT integrations would only be available as part of this plan). Well, this is also cheap, less than 1 USD per month.
But wait…
It wasn’t expensive, but I realized that everyone were implementing some VIP/Pro/Ultra plan and who knows what will come in the future.
23.88 USD per year for IFTTT, 10 USD per yer for eWelink. That’s 33.88 USD per year for now.
No, I can’t keep adding a new subscription every semester. I was already thinking of how much I was spending keeping the ones that I already have, but adding more was a NO NO.
Bye bye, IFTTT
Sometime in the future I will write more about how Home Assistant is an excellent solution for home automation (and more), but for now let me say that it solved my problems.
Don’t get me wrong, IFTTT is an amazing service and I will really miss some of its features and again, it was not expensive, I was paying USD 1.99 per month, but for whom was looking for a smaller number of subscription, it was not a viable option anymore.
Subscription cancelled
- Spotify: 14.99 USD per month (179.88 USD per year)
- IFTTT: 1.99 USD per month (23.88 USD per year)
- Total: 203.76 USD per year