Once it became clear that a purchase wasn't going to happen, Duane was able to purchase it for what I suspect was a fairly small amount of money. That's the point where the change over to "Space Clock" happened, because as it turned out there were some international addresses chewing down amazing amounts of bandwidth, etc. some of them for no clear reason.
I haven't kept track, but at one point there was a USB-bootable local version of the Chumby software available for download, though apps were problematic. I don't know if it improved beyond the level of "choose your apps by putting the files in the right place and editing GUID-like values in a config file" or not.
My wife still uses her Chumby as a clock, but I was actually thinking about stealing it from her so I can use it as a simple streaming audio alarm clock - that functionality is built right in.
Like you I think the Chumby is a great 'viewer' into things digital. Whether it is the time, my calendar, or whatever. My long neglected project is a Ubuntu with a DirectFB driver and the QT4 widget set. I'm going to have to see what it will take to bring that back. Robert Nelson has an excellent toolchain/process for building images for these things and ARM Linux has gotten a lot better in the last half decade.
I'd say $3/month is pretty conservative. How many Chumby users are there? How many will make the leap to the paid plan? Remember that he's offering the free tier.
The Chumby was a product from Bunnie Studios which was an ARM system with a touch screen, embedded is a bean bag kind of case. It had an application which is basically a flash player (yes on ARM, the only one I know of these days) and it would cycle between flash applications on a "channel." Some times it would cycle through to an advertisement.
It has an accelerometer, speaker, 320 x 240 x 16 touch screen, a couple of USB ports and a wireless network connector. You can wire up a USB serial port to the console if you have something like the AdaFruit FTDIFriend board.
It very much was the classic case of something "before its time" and the business model was kind of dicey. If you didn't want commercials you were out of luck. Once the company shut down they left a server up serving the one App I really liked, "Space Clock" which was a clock like you might see on a Star Trek universe ship (it has a very LCS look to it).
The site has been revived and a new business model has been put in placed, $3 per month subscription for the ability to run 'apps' on your Chumby. I presume it no longer shows ads.
Its sad for me because it has a really crappy clock app now that runs instead of the space clock, and that is going to force me to finish up my OS replacement. The thing is based loosely on the old Beagle board and much of the things that run on that board run on the Chumby. In particular there is a Ubuntu image for it.
I get the subscription thing, but I don't get the price. For $36/year you can run quite a bit of server. A single droplet ($5/month) can serve up several thousand Chumbies (they don't make I/O requests all that often). $3 a year would have made more sense to me, even $5 a year. Anything more than $12 a year and I'm just not going to go there.
The reason I have 3.5 is that the .5 is the 'Chumby Guts' option that Adafruit offered for a while. It was all of the parts, minus the squishy case. At $99 for the parts it was a really good deal for a small ARM linux system with a touch screen. I wish them luck, and I'm glad they are back, but I think they need to rethink that price.