Or: how to charge four times the price for a temperature sensor and call it innovation.

There’s a scammy pattern in consumer tech that’s become impossible to ignore. Take a perfectly ordinary piece of hardware, add the word “smart” to the box, jack up the price, and then quietly remove the very features that justified that price in the first place.

Ecobee thermostats are a textbook example.

They’re marketed as intelligent, adaptive devices that make your home more comfortable with less effort. In reality, they’re expensive, locked-down thermostats that demand more work from the user than cheaper alternatives-and got objectively worse after people already bought them.

That’s not innovation. That’s a rug pull.

“Smart” in Name Only

A genuinely smart thermostat should do something useful on its own. It should learn your habits, infer schedules, adapt over time, and reduce the amount of thinking you have to do. You shouldn’t need to micromanage it like a spreadsheet.

Ecobee doesn’t do that.

Out of the box, it doesn’t meaningfully learn your behavior. It doesn’t automatically build schedules that make sense. Instead, you’re pushed into manual configuration flows that are clunky, confusing, and surprisingly time-consuming. Want different behavior on weekdays versus weekends? Want seasonal adjustments? Want logic beyond the most basic rules? Congratulations-you’re doing it all yourself.

That’s not smart. That’s a basic thermostat with a touchscreen.

The Price Makes No Sense

Ecobee thermostats routinely sell for $200 to $250. At that price point, it’s reasonable to expect either meaningful onboard intelligence or a cloud service that’s doing serious computational work behind the scenes—learning behavior patterns, optimizing energy usage, or continuously improving performance over time.

That’s not what’s happening.

What you actually get is something far more mundane. At its core, an Ecobee thermostat is a basic temperature sensor wired to a relay that toggles your HVAC system on and off when thresholds are crossed. This is decades-old control logic. There’s no predictive model, no adaptive learning loop, and no sophisticated optimization engine running locally or in the cloud. The device doesn’t analyze your behavior in any meaningful way—it waits for you to tell it exactly what to do.

And the hardware reality makes this even harder to justify. Temperature sensors cost under five dollars in bulk. The microcontrollers required to run this logic are cheap, commodity parts. The scheduling system isn’t doing anything advanced—it’s essentially a calendar with if/then rules. None of this requires expensive infrastructure, and none of it improves over time without constant manual intervention.

Despite the marketing language, there is no hidden intelligence quietly saving you money or making better decisions than you would yourself. The thermostat doesn’t “figure things out.” It reacts. Everything labeled as “smart” still depends on the user doing the thinking, the planning, and the troubleshooting.

So where does the premium come from?

It isn’t engineering excellence. It isn’t software innovation. It’s branding, ecosystem lock-in, and the idea of smartness—selling consumers the promise of intelligence rather than delivering the reality of it.

If this device were priced honestly—based on what it actually does, not what the box implies—it would cost fifty dollars, at most. Anything more is paying for marketing and restrictions, not capability.

The API That Made It Worth Buying

For many technically literate users, the real value of Ecobee wasn’t the touchscreen or the marketing. It was the API.

Ecobee marketed and documented an official API that allowed integration with systems like Home Assistant. This enabled real automation: intelligent scheduling, occupancy-based control, energy optimization, and logic that actually was smart.

People didn’t just casually use this API. They built their homes around it.

Then Ecobee pulled it.

No meaningful transition plan. No equivalent replacement. No apology. And certainly no refunds.

“Just Use HomeKit” Is Not an Answer

Ecobee’s response was effectively: use HomeKit instead.

That sounds reasonable – until you actually try.

HomeKit is not an API. It’s a tightly controlled ecosystem with serious limitations. Most importantly, an Ecobee thermostat can only be paired with one HomeKit controller.

That means you must choose.

If you pair it with Home Assistant, you get real automation – but you lose Siri and Apple Home control. If you pair it with Apple Home, you keep voice control – but lose the advanced logic and scheduling that made the device useful in the first place.

You cannot have both.

So users are forced into a false choice between convenience and capability, entirely because Ecobee decided to lock down a product after it was sold.

Changing the Deal After Checkout

This is the part that should make everyone angry, even if you don’t care about smart homes.

People paid a premium for a product with open integration and API access. That capability was a core part of its value. Ecobee later removed it.

In almost any other industry, this would be unacceptable. Imagine buying a car and having features disabled remotely a year later. Imagine purchasing software and losing core functionality because the company changed its mind.

In consumer tech, companies get away with it – and we shouldn’t let them. We should be demanding a class action lawsuit. I don’t care one bit how expensive running their API was for them – you charged me $250 for a $5 sensor and a $5 relay – they have the money.

This Isn’t Smart. It’s Rent-Seeking.

What Ecobee sells today is not a smart thermostat. It’s a locked-down accessory designed to funnel users into someone else’s ecosystem.

There is no meaningful learning. There is no automation worth the price. There is no justification for charging hundreds of dollars for hardware that provides less freedom and fewer features than it did years ago.

Calling this product “smart” is misleading. Keeping the price high after stripping out functionality is exploitative.

Stop Accepting This

Consumers shouldn’t normalize paying more for less. We shouldn’t accept products that get worse over time, or companies that rewrite the deal after checkout.

If a company sells an API-enabled device and later removes the API, they owe users refunds – or at the very least, honesty.

Ecobee offers neither.

This isn’t the future of smart homes. It’s a warning sign.

And it’s exactly the kind of thing we should stop buying. Nest thermostats are no better, worse, as they tell consumers their thermostats will simply stop working!

Find out more

API Shutdown / Home Assistant Integration

HomeKit Limitations / Frustration

  • User frustrations with HomeKit reliability — multiple homeowner reports of Ecobee devices showing “No Response” and other issues when used through HomeKit. Ecobee HomeKit connection problems (Apple Community)
  • Reddit experiences with pairing and limitations — discussions about using HomeKit with Ecobee and the struggles to maintain automation or dependable control. Reddit

Reviews Showing Scheduling & UX Weaknesses

  • Ecobee SmartThermostat review with scheduling complaints — this longform review talks about how Ecobee’s scheduling can be unintuitive and frustrating to deal with manually. Ecobee SmartThermostat review (The Ambient)