The month Google originally bought Nest, I sold my thermostat to someone else and picked up an Insteon thermostat instead. My Insteon thermostat's been a reliable partner since, and doesn't send my data to anyone. I actually turned a profit on it, since I got rebate credit from my electric company originally for buying it.

I'm really happy with the Ecobee as well. The Alexa integration in the newer model doesn't work well possibly due to inferior microphones, in my experience, but I didn't want that anyway so it fits my needs perfectly.

In a few years, it will also return a profit due to an at-purchase and annual credit that my electricity utility provides.

The Ecobee has been great, simple and just works. I received it for free from some in-home energy program, but I will buy another when I move.

Does Ecobee have a local API option? I thought it was cloud based as well ...

As far as I understand, it is cloud-based as well with no accessible local API, so it unfortunately doesn't eliminate this possibility in the future.

Glad to see a recommendation for the Insteon thermostat. I have a Nest, but Insteon light switches (and other low voltage controls) throughout so that seems like the logical upgrade path.

Another thing I use that's quite handy is the wireless thermostat from Insteon. It's really more of a remote control/temperature sensor, but it integrates nicely. You can see the temperature from both units, and select which one is the master (the one it's trying to get to the set temperature).

I have pets which don't do well above a certain temperature so I keep my wireless unit by them.

My gripe is the design is nowhere near as good. It's like going from an iPhone to a feature phone.

I wish there were an open-source Nest firmware, or at least an open-source backend. Google doesn't need to know when I'm home.

"Design" is far from my key value metric in a thermostat. When I had my Nest, it looked pretty, but I kept having to re-set the temperature because they'd add some new smart feature that didn't behave the way I wanted to. I ended up largely crippling the crud out of it to begin with.

And of course, after I sold it there was the incident where a server error caused everyone's heat to stop working, so the fact that my pets didn't freeze to death that day made a big impact on me too. ;)

Nest is actually far from great thermostate, definitely not "iPhone" of thermostate. It doesn't allow lots of manual settings and it doesn't handle anything more than simple systems well. There is lot of marketing that is blinding but not much substance. You should check out thermostats like Ecobee instead.

Specifics? It does everything a basic programmable thermostat does in a simpler interface.

I would say it is exactly the iphone of thermostate because the iphone is far from a great phone.

All of the complaints you just made about nest can be attributed to apple as well

Google Nest Kin

I'm using a Nest with Homebridge to expose it to Homekit. Didn't want to purchase one due to the reliance on the cloud and lack of Homekit support.

After months of waffling I gave in and got one. I also regret that decision now too. Last Nest purchase I will ever make.

Same. Never buying a google product again.

You could still return it and get an ecobee.

You might actually have reasons for a lawsuit, if you can reasonable make the court believe that the reason for your purchase was the advertised works with nest API.

If a feature that was advertised is removed after sale, this is reason to revert the sale.

However T&C’s for such product provide legal protection for just this sort of event.

Those T&Cs can't overrule laws that say the opposite, and in the EU, such laws already exist.

Woah, I was really considering a Nest (I use Hass.io for many things, lighting at sunset, reading energy meter and my home energy usage), I'm very glad I didn't purchase one yet.

One more reason to go for a completely-in-my-lan solution.

I got a Venstar recently. Not as slick but has a local API and has worked well with hassio.

Looking at them now, thanx for the tip!

Not everything I'm running is open-source, but I made the same concession with Google in this case. Not using any other Google offering. Avoiding them by choice.

Nest products were the one exception. Previously owned several Nest Protect units and a thermostat. Moved, and installed a Nest thermostat and some temperature sensors. Just a couple of weeks ago, finished writing a data collection script to look at the temperatures in various rooms of the house. Mostly to have some real-world personal data to play with. Was hoping to write an Alfred workflow to change the temperature from my laptop.

Now I've lost those options, and in addition, I will have to have a Google account. (That is how the notice reads, right? You don't have to convert immediately, but you will have to convert eventually?)

Almost consider it my fault. I trusted Google in this one case after losing trust in Google in many other cases. “Fool me once, shame on — shame on you. Fool me — you can't get fooled again.”

Will probably start looking for alternatives. Hopefully the corporate machine is paying attention to this, and will realize that attempting to force users into your ecosystem will drive many of them to different ecosystems. But it will take time and effort to regain user trust.

Are there any good alternatives that let you self host a server send don't send your data to someone else? All I've found are some plans from Spark. It doesn't look too difficult to make, just wondering if there were any other kit projects out there.

I've just installed the Drayton Wiser system. It tries to be cloud based but doesn't need to be Internet connected.