They've been at this for a while. They do have offerings you subscribe for and pay monthly. They have also consistently offered an option for each of those offerings to bring your own or self host. They've earned my trust.

>>they’ve earned my trust

Boy I hope Broadcom didn’t hear that…

I tend to agree with you.

In my opinion, as long as the majority of their profits come from people continuing to buy the self-host devices, it is fairly unlikely they'll ever stop offering those devices. Why change a working business model?

Yes, subscription models are enticing for that recurring revenue... number must go up, right? /s

If a majority of your sales are not in subscription products though, I think it would be foolish for a business to blow off its own leg trying to chase that particular dragon.

Then again... businesses have made dumber calls in the past out of nowhere...

They can sell subscriptions to people who buy them and allow self contained as possible. For securities sake requiring off-site storage of a security system is a non-starter.

Yeah, that's also a very good point. I imagine they're going to need to support that use case indefinitely. Hence their edge/IoT line of managed switches.

Recently they removed the option to take certain types of backup locally (for the Network app). Now it only does it to the cloud, for those who allow this. It’s these small things that make me cautiously pessimistic that long term Ubiquity won’t pull the rug from under the customers.

Once you invest thousands in network equipment or cameras you’re less likely to jump ship when they start sneaking things in. And this is long lived equipment, not the kind you anyway replace every couple of years. So that’s a relatively strong lock-in.

They would be shooting themselves in the foot in the long term. I was surprised to learn that Ubiquiti is a publicly traded company, but also the CEO and founder owns the mass majority of the shares, so he is not beholden by shareholders wanting to enshittify the company for the same of increased stock prices.

It is their number one selling point vs. the competition. The space has already a dozen vendors with a healthy product mix.

It's definitely where they fit now, but are Ubiquiti's goals really always going to be the cheapest option when there are already a dozen other vendors who have demonstrated how to get higher margins & subscription revenue?

The usual trend that the smaller upsets compete on cost until they get higher and higher volume and work their way into higher and higher end markets. Ubiquiti 10 years ago was mostly doing volume for small niche ISPs or prosumers at home, now it's got enormous gains in SMB & products aimed at enterprise. I don't think they'll just stop at where they are, focus will keep shifting to wherever they think they can grow to rather than where they've had success before.

Anything can be sold to PE.

Sure. But all you can do, when deciding with whom to do business, is base your decision on what they have already done. It's not viable to refuse to do business with a company on the basis of "they might one day get bought by PE and introduce customer hostile changes".

I mean, in the NAS space with a plethora of open source alternatives, that is a viable stance.

Yeah actually, there are tons of PE-proof ways to go about building a NAS.

My "NAS" is a NUC with a couple drives plugged into it using a USB DAS. apt install zfs samba, and away you go.

At home, my "NAS" is the Linux desktop box under my desk. It's got a bunch of local drives doing ZFS things, and samba.

I could split up the functions into different boxes and build a faster LAN to connect them, but doing that wouldn't improve anything except giving me more parts to goof around with. :)

Ubiquiti is a giant publicly traded company... Read about the CEO, this won't happen.

They are already a public company.

93% owned by the founder.

I had to fact check this. Turns out it is true. I was not aware on US stock exchange you can have a public company with less than 10% public float.

This also makes the founder net worth of around $33B.

If you think that is bad, look into the spacex ipo. That tiny public offering is for stock that can barely vote and cannot bring shareholder actions, making them more NFTs than proper "shares" imho.

It's not bad. Great returns, company is extremely well run.

I know about voting shares and shareholder actions in US stock because they are somewhat frequently sited in all press and media. I just didn't know about sub 10% float.

I know there are plenty of ways to go around it via trust funds or other entities to hide it so the ownership could be extremely concenrtated. But having it actually allowed is something I didn't know.

You can take a public company private and then run it to the ground. See also: Twitter.

How does that work now they are a subsidiary of SpaceX?

Does that make the rotting corpse of Twitter public again?

Yes. Although the amount of SpaceX stock that's available for public is fairly little.

And those classes available for the public has less voting rights than Elons stock so even worse.

So man makes company, man shares profitability of company with world to invest in. World complains they can't outvote man.

Some of the details you are missing here matter quite a lot.

Im not an investor so I don’t care. But anyone buying into SpaceX should probably care that you are investing in a company you have zero influence in.

I don't believe this. They've been around since 2003, and the Unifi line started in 2010. If they were going to enshittify it would have happened by now. Cynicism is not always warranted.