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🆕 blog! “The Internet of Very Cheap Things”
Twelve years ago, I was complaining that IoT devices were too expensive. Last week I bought a colour changing Zigbee lighbulb for £4. Not a typo - less than a fiver.
While the aipocalypse is devouring RAM with its insatiable appetite, Moore's Law appears to be keeping up its end of the bargain when it comes to …
👀 Read more: https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2026/10/the-internet-of-very-cheap-things/
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#gadget #InternetOfThings #IoT #SmartHome
The Internet of Very Cheap Things
https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2026/10/the-internet-of-very-cheap-things/Twelve years ago, I was complaining that IoT devices were too expensive. Last week I bought a colour changing Zigbee lighbulb for £4. Not a typo - less than a fiver.
While the aipocalypse is devouring RAM with its insatiable appetite, Moore's Law appears to be keeping up its end of the bargain when it comes to domestic gadgetry.
This blog posts compares today's prices with those from a little over a decade ago. Some of the changes are startling, others less so. I'm basing the prices on what a customer can easily get today from Amazon. Yes, AliExpress is cheaper - but delivery takes and age and returns are a faff. Also, I get delicious affiliate revenue when you click the links which allows me to buy more tech crap to review. Everyone's a winner!
Door / Window Sensors
I don't know how many doors and windows you have in your property - we have about fifteen, not including internal doors and cupboards. Back then a single sensor cost around £30. Today you can get Zigbee door sensors for between £15 - £30 for a pack of four!
Prices are at least quartered. Do you need a sensor on every cupboard door or drawer? It is useful to be able to check your phone to see if the toilet seat is up or down? These are reaching the price where you might as well hook them up to anything.
Lightbulbs
Hue's WiFi lightbulbs were about fifty-quid each. Again, count the number of lights you need in your home and run to your bank-manager for an overdraft!
Today, Hue Bulbs are about £16 each. That's a pretty steep drop. If you want generic Zigbee Bulbs you can expect to pay a tenner each. That's down to a fifth of the price from 2014. If you're happy buying from AliExpress, they're usually under a fiver.
Smart Electrical Sockets
It's useful to be able to remotely control a power socket. It used to be the case they'd cost £30 per plug. Nowadays smart plugs are about £7.50. These ones come with energy monitoring and will easily integrate with HomeAssistant and other smarthome controllers.
There's still a limit to the things which can be directly controlled from a socket. That said, I'm love my IoT Electric Blanket.
Bluetooth Finders
The dream is to have a magic tag stuck on everything you might lose. Back in 2014, we thought iBeacons / Eddystones would win out. Sadly that dream died and instead we're stuck with proprietary "Find My" networks from Google and Apple.
The iBeacons were about a tenner each back then. Today they're £5 - £10 each depending on the features you want. That's still not cheap enough to attach to every sock - but there's no excuse for losing your keys, wallet, bag, or spouse again.
Annoyingly they don't use an open standard, so you'll need a Google or Apple account to use them.
NFC Tags
I still prefer QR codes (free!) to NFC, but I concede they do have their uses. Their capacity and features are much the same as they were a decade ago, but prices have dropped from about 75p per tag down to about 10p-20p per tag.
At that price, it's just about cheap enough to stick them in every book you own or sew them into all your underpants. Quite why you'd want to do that is left as an exercise for the reader.
Internet Fridge
You know what, I didn't bother looking at the actual cost of an Internet Fridge all those years ago. But earlier this year I got a WiFi enabled tumble dryer. It was as cheap as all the other models and means I can shout "ALEXA! MAKE DRY!" then receive a notification from HomeAssistant when the dry is fully maked.
I hope my next fridge comes with a sensor that alerts me if the door is left open or the freezer is getting too warm. That would be handy.
The cost of an ESP32 is basically a rounding error for most large appliances, especially when bought in bulk. If it uses electricity, it is probably trivial to add WiFi and Bluetooth.
What's Next?
There's probably a realistic limit to how low prices can go while the products still remain safe and durable. For smaller items that appears to be between a fiver in bulk direct from China to about a tenner sourced from a mainstream UK supplier.
For domestic appliances, there doesn't seem to be any significant extra cost. Take a look at these heat pump tumble dryers - even the cheapest of them comes with an app.
There are a few bits of my home which haven't yet been given their own IP address - although they're mostly towards the mechanical side of things.
But I Don't Want To Live In A Smarthome 😡
Literally no one is forcing you. If you don't want your TV to spy on you, it'll work just fine if you don't connect it to your WiFi.
If you like getting out of bed to make sure you switched off the downstairs lights, that option is still available to you.
There's no law which says you have to connect your solar panels to the web - but I like seeing exciting graphs each day.
I cannot pre-heat my smart toilet seat, nor can I change the bidet's water pressure from my phone. That's probably a good thing?
But I like gadgets! Sure, some of them are crappy - but I find it fun to get them working with HomeAssistant. Might they get hacked and send all my data to Arstotzka? Meh, they're all on a separate LAN and are connected to things which are unlikely to burn down my house. Might I wake up one day and find that the machine has stopped and my ability to draw my own curtains has atrophied? That's a chance I'm willing to take.
The practical advantage I get from being about to check my security cameras on my phone from the other side of the planet is worth the theoretical risks.
I wonder what other domestic gadgetry will fall prey to the irresistible lure of cheap connectivity?
#gadget #InternetOfThings #IoT #SmartHome