As someone with a bunch of Alexa's in my house, I'm actually fine with them charging for it, as it allows things to be more sustainable. Even the current feature set of Alexa is clearly massively expensive to run, and buying a (usually) cheap piece of hardware at-cost, shouldn't necessarily guarantee me that they will pay server fees for my usage forever.
When first hearing about their financial issues, my initial thought was that they should have launched Alexa with a small fee, like $2-3 a month, but waive that for anyone with Prime. It wouldn't really bring in much extra revenue, but would give another hook into Prime, which they are always looking for. This would make sense for the current feature set.
Now, once you get into generative AI, the server cost sky-rockets upwards, and there would be no reasonable way to do it without charging. And again, if you actually want to use Alexa for that type of stuff (which I don't), then charging for it is perfectly reasonable, and looking at other such services, would probably put it at close to $20-30 a month. I don't see it as actually being a good value, but if someone wants it, I don't think that type of price would be un-fair, based on the cost to run it.
Basically, everyone scoffs at being charged for services they use, but I think it's required to keep a business sustainable, without the entire world being based off of "free" services paid for by nothing but ads and personal data.
When first hearing about their financial issues, my initial thought was that they should have launched Alexa with a small fee, like $2-3 a month, but waive that for anyone with Prime. It wouldn't really bring in much extra revenue, but would give another hook into Prime, which they are always looking for. This would make sense for the current feature set.
Now, once you get into generative AI, the server cost sky-rockets upwards, and there would be no reasonable way to do it without charging. And again, if you actually want to use Alexa for that type of stuff (which I don't), then charging for it is perfectly reasonable, and looking at other such services, would probably put it at close to $20-30 a month. I don't see it as actually being a good value, but if someone wants it, I don't think that type of price would be un-fair, based on the cost to run it.
Basically, everyone scoffs at being charged for services they use, but I think it's required to keep a business sustainable, without the entire world being based off of "free" services paid for by nothing but ads and personal data.
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