Honda paywalls its garage door opener
At some point, this stops being “innovation” and starts being a toll booth.
Honda has taken a feature that used to be a single dumb button press: open garage, go inside, live your life, and turned it into an app, a login, a piece of hardware, and a subscription, because apparently even arriving home now needs a payment plan.
From convenient to annoying, monthly subscription services have risen beyond their convenience and straight into annoyance. What started as paywalls to unlock features already available on owned vehicles – as was the case with BMW and its pay-to-heat-the-seat debacle – and also more advanced paywalls, like Tesla’s full self-driving function.
While the latter makes sense because it costs money to run data centers, hire people to run them, and pay developers to improve the system, among many other things, hiding basic functions and features behind paywalls is generally questioned in the industry.
At some point, this stops being “innovation” and starts being a toll booth. Why not make it pay-per-use?
So, just get an unconnected opener from Menards and use it for free. Honda will stop selling them once people stop buying them.