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Offering a service to users costs money. Offering a free service to customers also costs money.
What I do hate is when a service has done things for free for many years and suddenly wants to cash in, after they made you addicted.
I am talking about IFTTT.
I got this mail from IFTTT and it really pissed me off.
I have written several stories on IFTTT on this weblog. And I really liked their webhook service. IFTTT sat between your Google Assistant and, speaking pre-defined messages allowed to send commands to, ESP8266 or ESP32.
You could also send notifications to your phone if one of your microcontrollers noticed a temperature rising, a door opening etc.
Then a few years back IFTTT decided that free users were no longer allowed to have more than 3 applets. That really restricted a lot of users who build my projects. But hey it was still free.
And now they made things worse.
No webhooks can be used anymore with a free account as you can read in the above mail !!
And it is not that they give us ample time to look for an alternative. No this mail was send on 6 february, just a week before the free service is shut down !!
So first they make you addicted with a free account.
Then they restrict the service.
Then they make you pay.
The most I am pissed about is that many of the readers of this weblog and readers of my book ESP32 Simplified relied on IFTTT to get a lot of their home automation done.
And now that everything has been working for many years they suddenly have to pay.
To the readers of this weblog and my book ESP32 Simplified I say: sorry that I introduced you to IFTTT.
What I say to IFTTT is not suitable for publishing.
Luckily there are several free services that you can use to make your microcontrollers send notifications to your phone.
- Telegram has an API that you can use. There are stories on that on this web-log
- Pushbullet is a free service that has an API.
- NTFY is a service with a large free tier. I am going to do a story on this.
But maybe we should abandon cloud services all together and build a simple IOT server in our home using a cheap Raspberry Pi. Because IFTTT is not the first to pull this trick: remember Blynk ???
Luc Volders
