In light of the Grobo situation, allot of people have a bad taste in their mouth when it comes to cloud based automation devices. When a user can’t control the device when the internet is out, the cloud server is shutdown, having a network issue or the business just says FU and closes shop… it’s a very large problem. I ask as future request to make sure the Niwa Grow Hub can speak locally on the network between the app and itself without needing cloud, but can also use the cloud for the purpose of the data and charts. I hope your business is insane and stays busy for years to come but give the people something to fall back on if the shit hits the fan.
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I completely understand your concern, this is a risk with all IoT and cloud based devices and services. It’s very unfortunate what happened to Grobo and many other companies. In the other hand, there are so many benefits on cloud based services that we cannot give up on this technology.
From the product development perspective, once you choose one way (being connected to Internet or not) you’ll try to make the most of your available technology, in our case we chose cloud because we believe it can provide the best possible service.
When a company shuts down, no matter if it’s cloud based or not, it’s a loss for all its customers, no more support, tech service, parts, or in the case of cloud (the worst one without a doubt), the product/service might not work anymore…
Some companies take great risks when developing products, often boosted with big amounts of capital, and sometimes they fail or success big time. We’ve been developing solutions for growers since 2015, and we feel confident with our product and market fit. That’s not a guarantee, the risk is there, but we are very cautions when taking risks and keep trying our best to guarantee we can offer (and keep offering) the best possible solution for growers.
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Thank you @Javier_Niwa for that. I’m a grobo victim. I purchased last august 2021 and they disappeared December 21, 2021. Left hundreds of us abandoned. I was able to get my money back through dispute but it was nerve racking. 2K is a lot of money! Everything you said makes sense.
I really appreciate your product and customer service. Thank you. I’ll be here as Long as you are.
Thank you
You are very luck you got your money back. I never got one successful grow on mine and never got my money back 
. But we move on and learn from certain situations, which his why I created this subject.
@Javier_Niwa not to beat a dead horse but it is still possible to have cloud functionality and have local network functionality with an app and device, see Ubiquiti’s app functionality for their networking devices and router. And let us not say that its not possible.
I’ll leave it at that and go on from here. Anyways thanks for the chat all.
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Being honest, with our current hardware, it would be really difficult to have that, not impossible, but it would be unlikely to achieve a good performance. That is a completely different product with completely different internals.