Tado: Company stirs up users with plans to introduce a firewall and a fee

The Tado community is currently buzzing on Reddit and on the company's own forum. The cause: Tado is planning to put the use of some of its own products behind a paywall. A recently published advertisement states that Tado will in future charge a fee of one British pound per month for use of the Tado app. This fee is to be paid per household and the change will come into force on May 1. However, the control of Tado devices via Apple Home, Google Home and Amazon Alexa will remain free of charge. One of the reasons given for the fee is increased server costs. 

Tado itself has since followed up on this announcement on its own community forum and rather tersely. The company clarified that it carries out marketing tests at regular intervals and that this message was apparently one such test, which was not communicated to all users, but only to participants in this marketing trial. It also means that Tado is not backtracking on the advertisement, so it can be strongly assumed that the company is seriously considering this as an opportunity for additional monetization.

The outcry in the community has been quite strong, with users on Reddit, for example, stating that they will seriously reconsider purchasing Tado products in the future. It is unclear whether there is a right to compensation if an advertised functionality, e.g., the use of an app, is no longer free of charge. In any case, Tado's approach doesn't exactly confer any advantages to customers.