Starting in October, Samsung charges for access to the SmartThings API.
Four dollars and ninety-nine cents a month, for non-commercial developers. Free access continues through the end of Q3. The SmartThings app itself is unaffected, and the millions of people who use it normally will never notice. This only touches people who talk to the API directly: custom integrations, third-party dashboards, and open platforms. Home Assistant has confirmed its SmartThings integration is affected.
Most of the coverage has treated this as a consumer story, and the comment sections have gone where comment sections go. I want to make a different argument, because I don't think five dollars is worth being angry about, and I don't think Samsung is the villain here.
I think this is a business story, and I think the people it lands hardest on aren't hobbyists. They're the small contractors who install this stuff for a living.
Two numbers Samsung didn't publish
The $4.99 is the number everybody reported. It's the least interesting thing in the announcement. Here are the two that matter, and both of them are blanks:
| What we know | What we don't |
|---|---|
| $4.99/month, non-commercial | The rate limit or call cap that puts you on the paid tier |
| Commercial tiers are "in the pipeline" | What a commercial tier costs |
Read those right-hand cells again, because that's the whole piece.
If you run some light automation at home, Samsung has not told you whether you're a paying customer in October. There's a price, but the usage level that triggers it hasn't been published, so you can't determine which side of the line you're on.
And if you install SmartThings-connected equipment in other people's buildings for money, you are in a worse position. You are commercial by definition, and the commercial tier has no number attached to it at all.
If you quoted a job in June with a Samsung-connected device in it, you sold a fixed price against an input cost that a third party can now set, hasn't set yet, and doesn't have to tell you about in advance.
That is not a hobbyist problem. That is a contractor who cannot compute their cost of goods for work they have already sold.
The phone call
Here is how this actually plays out, and it's the part I've been thinking about all week.
Some facility manager or homeowner had a system put in. They paid for it. It was a finished job. There was a proposal with a total on it, they signed the total, somebody spent two days installing it, and everyone shook hands.
In October, something in that system starts asking for money. Or stops working. Or works differently in a way nobody can immediately explain.
They are not going to call Samsung. They have no relationship with Samsung. They do not know that a piece of what they bought is a Samsung API, because why on earth would they. What they know is the name of the person who installed it.
So they call the integrator. And the integrator has to explain that a company neither of them has a contract with has added a recurring charge to a job that was finished and paid for months ago, that the integrator didn't sell it, doesn't collect it, can't waive it, and can't tell them what it'll be next year either.
There is no good version of that conversation. Even when you handle it perfectly, the customer walks away with slightly less confidence in you than they had that morning. You absorbed reputational damage on behalf of a vendor who will never know your name.
Being fair to Samsung
I want to argue the other side properly, because the outrage take is lazy and I think Samsung is substantially right on the merits.
Running an API costs money forever. Selling somebody a hub once and then serving their API calls for a decade is not a business, it's a slowly compounding liability, and the industry's habit of pretending otherwise is how you get products that quietly get worse until they're discontinued. Samsung already shut down the original SmartThings hubs in 2021. Charging a small, honest, sustainable fee is a more respectful path than the alternative, which is letting the thing rot and then killing it.
And $4.99 is cheap. Genuinely. If you're running Home Assistant against SmartThings, five dollars a month for a maintained API is not a bad deal, and I'd pay it without complaining.
So my objection isn't the fee. It's two narrower things.
The first is the blanks. Announcing a price without announcing the quota that triggers it, and announcing commercial tiers without announcing what they cost, moves the uncertainty onto people who have to write proposals. Publish the numbers and most of this problem evaporates. Contractors can price around any number. They can't price around a blank.
The second is the precedent, which is bigger than Samsung. Google, Amazon, and Apple all still provide smart home API access for free. Samsung is the first of the four to charge. That free access has been the load-bearing assumption underneath basically every third-party smart home integration for a decade, and it was never a promise. It was a habit. One major vendor just proved the habit is revocable, and the other three watched it happen without consequence.
I don't know if they'll follow. I know that the thing preventing them from following got weaker on July 28.
What this looks like from my side
I put edge AI monitoring into small commercial buildings. A sump pump in a Watertown basement that's been running around the clock for two years. About forty devices in a building in Northampton. Air handlers, compressors, walk-in coolers, the machines whose failure ruins somebody's week.
None of it depends on a cloud API to do its job. The sensing, the baseline, the drift detection, and the decision to alarm all happen on a small box in the building. If the internet goes down, the monitor keeps monitoring.
I want to be precise, because this is exactly the kind of claim that gets stated loosely and deserves not to be. Nothing is on a vendor platform whose terms can change out from under the customer. But there is an outbound path for notifications, and that path touches services I don't own. If my SMS provider triples their price, that's my cost to absorb, not a surprise line item on my customer's system. The difference is that the part that decides something is wrong has no external dependency, and the part with external dependencies can be swapped in an afternoon without touching a single installed device.
That wasn't foresight about Samsung's pricing. I built it that way for a dumber and more physical reason: the storm that floods the basement is the same storm that takes the internet down. A water alarm that needs a cloud API is statistically most likely to be offline in precisely the hour it exists for. That's an unacceptable design in a way that has nothing to do with business models.
The commercial argument came free with the reliability one. I've been making the privacy and reliability case for two years. This week is the first time the commercial case got concrete, because now there's a real example of a platform repricing a job that was already finished.
The reason people accept the dependency, and why it's expiring
I should be honest about why integrating a vendor cloud is genuinely attractive, because it isn't laziness.
It's faster to build. It supports vastly more devices than anything you'd write yourself. The customer gets a polished phone app you didn't have to make. And critically, somebody else carries the operational burden of keeping deployed devices updated and alive, which for a one-person shop is a real and reasonable fear. Maintaining your own fleet of boxes scattered across other people's buildings has historically been the kind of problem that eats a small company.
That last argument is the load-bearing one, and it's getting weaker fast.
The same week Samsung announced the fee, two former Scythe Robotics founders came out of stealth with a company built specifically to solve fleet deployment for small operators. Their tool pushes software updates to devices wherever they are, over connections that barely qualify as connections: LTE, 3G, satellite, and in one case sonar links to underwater robots. Devices that disappear mid-update and come back later are treated as normal rather than as errors. Their launch partners include an agricultural robotics company running more than 750 machines in fields.
Their founder's framing of the problem is almost funny in how plain it is. Installing software is something everyone does, he said, but for robots there really isn't a tool made to make it easy.
Put that next to the rest of this year. Microchip published a free reference design for a battery-powered, on-device machine learning node that predicts motor failure locally with no cloud. Capable edge processors that aren't NVIDIA's are now standard parts. A single chip shipped this week with WiFi 6, Bluetooth, Zigbee, and Thread on it. Decent sensors run $30 to $300, down from $500 to $2,000 a decade ago.
Every one of those makes owning your whole stack more practical for a small shop than it was three years ago. The historical reason to rent someone else's platform is quietly disappearing, right at the moment renting it got more expensive and less predictable.
What to ask, if you have any of this installed
This is a reasonable week to find out what your building actually depends on. Four questions, in order of how much trouble the answer can cause you:
- Ask for a written list of every external service the system needs. Not "is it cloud-based." An itemized list. Any competent installer can produce it in an hour, and the ones who get evasive are telling you something.
- For each item, ask what happens if that company changes its price or shuts down. The answers should sound different. Swapping a notification service is an afternoon. Being welded to a platform API is a rebuild.
- Ask what still works with the internet cut. Specifically: does it still detect the problem, or does it only stop being able to tell you? Those are very different failures. One is a delayed notification. The other is a flooded basement nobody knew about.
- Ask who pays if a vendor adds a fee. Ask it now, while it's a hypothetical and the conversation is easy. Whoever's carrying that risk should know they're carrying it before October, not during.
My systems are deliberately boring and mostly disconnected, which has never once impressed anybody in a sales meeting. What it means is that I can answer all four of those questions in writing, and that the answers won't change in October because somebody posted to a blog.
Monitoring that nobody else can reprice.
One off-the-shelf sensor per critical asset and a small box on a shelf that learns how that specific machine behaves, then watches for the drift that shows up before a failure. The detection runs in your building, so it keeps working when the internet doesn't. Read-only, never on your control network, no new conduit, no panel work. Installed in an afternoon, with a written list of every external service it touches. Start with the one machine whose failure would ruin your week.
See how it worksSources: Samsung SmartThings API paid access, the $4.99 per month non-commercial tier, the October 2026 effective date, free access continuing through Q3 2026, the unpublished rate limits and call caps that determine who pays, the commercial tiers described as in the pipeline with no disclosed pricing or quotas, the confirmed impact on the Home Assistant SmartThings integration, and the contrast with Google, Amazon, and Apple continuing to provide smart home API access at no charge, via Hackaday, “Samsung's SmartThings API Terminates Free Access” (July 28, 2026), with corroborating coverage from Android Authority, Eastern Herald, and Gadget Hacks, and Samsung's own announcement on the SmartThings blog. Samsung's 2021 discontinuation of the original SmartThings hubs via Hackaday. Agency Tool Company and ATC Deploy, founded by Jack Morrison and Davis Foster, both formerly co-founders of Scythe Robotics, including the Morrison quote on the absence of deployment tooling for robots, the handling of LTE, 3G, satellite, and sonar links, and launch partners Burro with more than 750 agricultural robots, Gather AI, and Tempo, via The Robot Report (July 28, 2026). Microchip's Wi-Fi enabled edge AI reference design for predictive maintenance on electric motors, battery powered with local inference on vibration and audio, via Embedded.com and Microchip edge AI materials (July 2026). LILYGO T-Display C5 with ESP32-C5 supporting dual-band WiFi 6, Bluetooth LE, Zigbee, and Thread, and the Jetway SMC-ARK1 SMARC module on Rockchip RK3588, via CNX Software (July 27 and 28, 2026). IoT sensor costs of $30 to $300 today against $500 to $2,000 a decade ago via Xiri.ai. Field deployments at The Intersecto Watertown sump-pump site and Northampton 40-device building.