I presume you are being rhetorical here because the best place to put this information would be on this forum and we all know that didn’t happen.
Your analysis has only one major flaw in it, and that is the cost of a certificate is peanuts compared to the cost of the servers rented on AWS for TTN to run, so your assumption is unlikely.
The status from the update is:
" During this maintenance window, we will deploy changes to how The Things Indoor Gateways (non-pro versions only) connect to The Things Stack to ensure their continued operation.
The Things Indoor Gateways will have to reconnect for the changes to apply. Since TTIGs have a backoff mechanism, it may take a few minutes for them to reconnect.
This change was successfully verified in TTS Sandbox au1 cluster and will be applied to the nam1 and eu1 cluster.
Jul 1, 16:30 CEST"
Which says “we know there is an issue, we have a resolution, we tested it at scale on the Australians and we are deploying it for everyone else”.
Unfortunately a small percentage of gateways didn’t reconnect.
Around 300 gateways came back online between 08:15 and 08:35 this morning.
Working on SysOps on a Sunday morning is indicative of a company working to resolve an issue as soon as it can.
TTI made a commitment to keep the community version running for free and we haven’t heard otherwise.
Almost every single free internet service that has needed funding or donations or some such at a late point in its existence has never managed to bridge the gap. I think we see TTNMapper as the perfect example - despite the real possibility of it having to close and some substantial down time, I’m not aware of there being a sizeable uptick in donations or Patreon subscriptions.
There is work & effort involved in collecting money, as I mention above, anything less than 2€ would actually cost more than it makes to process & do admin on.
And one of the best business lessons I was taught 30+ years ago is that the problem with charging for a service is that people expect something for their money. So it has to be priced at a level that allows the service to be delivered, it can’t just pay for hardware or rental, all the costs need to be covered with some left over for a rainy day, plus ongoing upgrades etc etc.
Which is why the TTI entry level instance is 190€/month for up to 1,000 devices, rather than some graduated scale of charges starting at just 1 device. Because if you have a user with 9 devices on some entry level tier, say 2€/device/month, and they have a problem, telling them they haven’t paid enough to be able to get personal support usually involves a long enough exchange to fully wipe out the 18€ they did pay, but several times over.
And that 190€/month doesn’t get you help desk support - it is very much RTFM time plus knowing the LW spec plus RTFM on the hardware you deploy. If you want to ask someone questions, that’s the 300€ option, but even then only a limited number of times with a response time of 8 hours. Because just one support question is likely to require the whole of that 110€ to service. It is described as “Limited scope and maintenance, suited for experienced LoRaWAN developers” - fundamentally you need to be mostly self-sufficient. The 600€/month for the support element gets you what most people imagine to be a help desk.
And in all this, all the “interesting” cheap & cheerful device & gateway hardware that people can buy that tend to work OK are out of scope for support, see Service Level Agreement | The Things Industries
LoRaWAN was developed to service thousands of devices which is why it’s all big & corporate and has specs with numbers on each line and some serious charges for support because if you need it, it’s likely to be complicated and need people with serious chops to be able to sort stuff out.
TTN is mostly users with one or two gateways and a handful of devices. We are the polar opposite of the normal customer in so many aspects. Sometimes it is best not to look a gift horse in the mouth.
