Your smart home should outlast the company that sold it

In April 2022, Insteon switched off its servers with no warning. One day the app worked. The next, thousands of homes lost control of lights, locks and thermostats they'd paid good money for, because the hub they'd bought needed a company's cloud server to function, and that company had decided to stop paying for the server.

It wasn't the first time. Google's Nest division bought a smart home hub company called Revolv in 2014. Revolv's hardware had been sold with a "lifetime subscription." Eighteen months later, in May 2016, Nest switched it off anyway. Wink, another hub maker, kept its hardware alive but started charging a monthly subscription in May 2020 just to keep basic automations running, features that used to be free the day you unboxed the thing.

Different companies, same pattern. You buy a piece of hardware. The hardware is really a shell around someone else's server. The day that company changes its mind, gets acquired, or runs out of money, your "smart" home reverts to a wall of dumb switches that happen to have an app icon on them.

Why this keeps happening

Most consumer smart home products aren't really products. They're subscriptions with a hardware deposit. The lightbulb, the hub, the lock, whatever it is, needs to phone home to a server somewhere to do anything beyond the most basic function. That server costs money to run. When the business model stops working, the server goes, and so does your automation.

This isn't a knock on any one brand. It's the structural problem with closed, proprietary ecosystems. The manufacturer controls the hardware, the software and the cloud, and none of it works without all three staying in business at the same time, indefinitely, on your behalf. You're betting your home's wiring on a company's quarterly earnings.

What an open standard does differently

KNX has been around since the 1990s, and this is the actual reason it matters, not the marketing version. It's an open standard maintained by an independent association, not a single company's product line. Any certified manufacturer can build a KNX device, and it will talk to any other certified KNX device, regardless of brand, because they all speak the same protocol over a physical wired bus. There's no cloud account required for the lights to turn on and the blinds to move. The bus doesn't care if a manufacturer goes bust next year.

The KNX Association itself makes the point that installations from before 2000 are still fully operational today. Not "still working with a workaround." Fully operational, on hardware and a protocol designed three decades ago, because nobody owns KNX in a way that lets them switch it off.

That's the difference between an open standard and a proprietary system. A proprietary system is only as durable as the company behind it. An open standard is durable because no single company can kill it.

What this means for a project

I build on Hager and Ekinex for the KNX layer, with 1Home bridging to Home Assistant and Matter where it makes sense. None of that is an accident. It's what lets me tell a client, honestly, that the switch on their wall will still work in fifteen years even if a particular manufacturer disappears, gets bought out, or discontinues a product line. The wiring, the bus, the logic, none of it depends on one company's survival.

That matters more in a country like ours, where imported hardware, exchange rates and supply chains already add enough uncertainty. Betting a home's core systems on a single vendor's cloud roadmap is a risk most people don't realise they're taking until the app stops working.

It's worth saying plainly: this isn't a load shedding story. Eskom has now gone over a year without shedding, and the near-term outlook into winter is stable. But it's still worth building a home that doesn't need the grid, or a foreign server, to stay working. Resilience isn't only about power. It's about who else has a hand on the switch.

The question worth asking before you sign anything

If you're speccing a smart home system, ask the installer one question: what happens to this house if the manufacturer disappears tomorrow? If the honest answer involves a cloud subscription you can't control, that's worth knowing before the walls close up, not after.

If you're planning a build or renovation and want a system that isn't betting your house on one company's balance sheet, get in touch. Just a conversation about what the project needs.

Wayne | KNX Logic

wayne@knxlogic.co.za | 082 564 3982 | www.knxlogic.co.za

Sources: KNX Association, 5 Smart Home Trends to Watch in 2026 (11 Dec 2025) | Hackaday, Insteon Abruptly Shuts Down (25 Apr 2022) | How-To Geek, 7 smart home brands that bricked their own products | Eskom, Eskom marks 300 days without loadshedding (13 Mar 2026) | Mail & Guardian, No load-shedding in sight as Eskom forecasts stable winter supply (22 Apr 2026)