[theamk]

Corporate money - if all you have is software engineers getting $250_000/year , the company likely pays ~$250/hour with all the overhead. So you are not paying "$500", you are paying 2 FTE hours. This is pretty small, corporate-wise: a single 1 hour meeting with 10 people in it is 10 FTE hours, and most managers won't think twice before organizing it.

Even DIY solution might not be more economic: sure, if you are familiar with RPi and have one on hand, and someone already wrote the software, you can do it in under 2 hours. But a single problem, like a defective SD card, and the pre-paid solution is now cheaper. Same goes for subscription: $80/year, or 20 FTE minutes. Yes, you can find those layers for free. Will this take you >20 minutes per year to setup and maintain? Probably not.

I was at my first job when I discovered "corporate money" and this was a real eye-opener... That $2000 tool that can only do one super-specific operation? Pays for itself if you can have two fewer defective assemblies.

[RHSeeger]

Sorry, I didn't ask my question well.

Your answer seems to speak to the idea of "we need this in order for our offices to be able to function, what's the most cost effective way acquire it. I can't imagine _any_ office that would need such a thing. It seems to be purely decorative in nature. And the (quality of the) monitor (which isn't part of that cost) is the majority of the decorative part.

I was asking more from the individual perspective; why someone would spend $500 + subscription on something like this, when it should be relatively trivial to just run software that does something like it yourself. Given that it doesn't come with the display, picking a nice display and hooking it up seems like the majority of the work involved.

[theamk]

Offices don't only spend money "to be able to function" - there are all sort of expenses which are entirely optional. Workers' morale, manager's morale, "prestige", etc.. Have you ever heard about management ordering pizza for workers when something goes well? Do you know how much this costs? It's $50 in pizza + 10 people x 1 hour = $2500 in wages, for total $2550 for that pizza party. A totally optional spend, which is not required for offices to be able to function. And yet it happens all the time in many many offices. And don't get me started on cost of all-hands meetings.

And that's why most offices won't think twice about buying that $500 box. A random manager, or even a senior programmer wants it? Sure, get it, no need to even get any approval since it is under $1000. There are exceptions, but that's the thought in many US-based software organizations.

From individual perspective, you are right it makes no sense. If this was my house, I'd do it all myself. But this is not marketed to individuals, it is marketed to people working in companies.