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by danw1979 40 days ago
Reminder about the way Ubiquiti does this, as a vendor who wanted to provide users remote access to their own devices behind NAT: Unifi Cloud handles the auth and connection brokerage through a public portal, but you’re then connected straight to your own gear using your web browser (or one of the apps, if you choose). I can even turn all this off if I want to handle the remote access side of it myself.

Other vendors take note !
1 comments
Gormo 40 days ago
Ubiquiti really should be the model for every company selling hardware today.

Their business model is a straightforward "sell a good product at a reasonable price" approach, and they seem to be quite successful at it without needing to resort to gimmickry, subscription fees, or other even less savory ways of monetizing other people's activities.

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skinfaxi 40 days ago
I'm still pretty sour that they removed the ability to self-host the NVR and you have to use their cloud solution now.
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danw1979 40 days ago
You’re talking about when you used to be able to run Unifi Video on your own distro? Yeah that was good, but you definitely don’t have to “use their cloud solution” for NVR now; you buy the box, the video is stored on the box.
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skinfaxi 40 days ago
Yeah you used to be able to run unifi video on your own hardware. Now you have to use their box and access it through their cloud. I had notifications working in the self-hosted version with VPN.
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Gormo 32 days ago
Yeah, that was an annoying move, but a bit more understandable in terms of the support overhead of dealing with controller installations in a wide variety of disparate environments. They could have continued to offer it in an "unsupported" state, but then there are already great community-driven FOSS projects like Frigate in that space that are a better fit for the self-hosting segment.

But Ubiquiti doesn't really seem to be going for ecosystem lock-in: on the flipside, earlier this year, they released an update to UniFi Protect that enabled any RTSP-based video stream to be connected into it, rather than just their own cameras. That enabled us to migrate a site with 30+ Hikvision cameras over to UniFi infrastructure without having to purchase all new cameras from Ubiquiti.

Other companies might be disappointed that we didn't buy cameras from them, but maybe the people at Ubiquiti understand that we weren't going to do that in the first place, and not being able to use our existing cameras was a blocking factor for us to move the rest of the infrastructure over to UniFi.

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