[toofy]

while i agree that unifi is worth looking at, id urge anyone reading this to be a little weery there:

i used to own extensive unifi equipment for my home network, 8 access points, 2 switches, gateway, a couple cams, etc… it was amazing, the initial setup, the interoperability, the stability and maintenance was absolutely painless. i will loudly sing them praises for those things, but i started noticing them trying to jam cloud features and subscriptions behind paywalls deeper into the integration, it’s pretty obvious that its only a matter of time before they enshitify with pay-for-features paywalled behind subscriptions, cloud first, etc…

keep that in mind before you dive headfirst. their stuff was perfect in that stability sweet spot of better than small office but not quite enterprise tier local only configurations, but i personally dipped as soon as i saw what i think is the writing in the wall.

i love their stuff, genuinely i did, but if the goal is to move further away from subscriptions and cloud-first, be very cautious of their current trajectory.

[Arrowmaster]

I did a full security system replacement for my previous employer in our data center. Replaced all the old IP cameras that connected directly to a small black box nvr with UniFi camera recording onto a UniFi Video server writing to a NAS cable locked to the rack in our locked data center. Two months later UniFi Video was discontinued and stopped receiving updates or support. If we wanted a supported platform we had to purchase a UniFi Protect NVR with less storage and less power/network redundancy than what I built. Plus all access to UniFi Protect would run through their cloud portal.

Yes I'm still bitter.

[noduerme]

Guh.

This makes me wonder if it's inevitable for every hardware/software provider to be tempted by the candy now. Makes me ask myself if I could even resist it if I had a customer base with sunk costs who I could take advantage of. My feeling is that I could resist it, on principle, but most people wouldn't. And this is leaving out pressure from investors.

So such a company selling these solutions as locally run widgets - which we understand are under not just pressure to increase revenue, but also relentless pressure from governments to share their data - would definitely need to be completely self-funded, immediately profitable, and the solutions they sold would have to be permanent and not susceptible to any external market or government forces.

Zero updates and zero tracking of installations would be the goal.

[edit] but this is also not that hard. All the company needs to provide is a piece of software that stitches together existing hardware. The only updates would be when hardware updates, and those would be included in the price. If "NEVER CLOUD" was the company's entire corporate identity, then preserving that ethos would be a mandate.

[edit2] nevercloud.com is currently on sale for $8350. I'd suggest building the prime directive into the name, but that much money has better uses.

[mlrtime]

>all access to UniFi Protect would run through their cloud portal.

I have a unvr and protect and nothing runs through their portal, I connect directly to the ip address of the unvr. You can cut internet access off on the vlan and everything works fine.

[petepete]

Were you using Unifi VOIP or the enterprise Identity stuff?

They're the only subscription things I've seen if you have your own controller.

I haven't seen that writing on the wall yet, Unifi are one of a select few tech companies I trust.

[mlrtime]

Some of their firewall/security signature upgrade packages are paid. I just ignored the request once and never see it.