It’s just been noted on their forum that the HE C7 and prior hub’s Zigbee chipset does not allows them to provide a full service after all (it will require repairing of the devices to the new hub rather than a seemless transition to a new hub). That’s a bit disappointing after it was supposed to be released months ago with this stated capability and now it seems not possible.
Something to bear in mind for @markus and the new Collective Core 
I’d like to think we have a pretty awesome and forward thinking head coder and team here, so I doubt we will be running into these sort of “issues”
Without Zigbee migration, that leaves only ZWave, something that any customer with a C-4 and the HUSBZB-1 stick can do on their own. So in my opinion this Hub Protection service is nothing more than an extended warranty. I’m also willing to speculate the cost of a year of this service will more than cover the hardware cost… Not that is a bad idea considering how many hubs I’ve had fail from low duty cycle, weak eMMC.
Ohh… I couldn’t find that news in HE community. Can you quote it please?
That is a bonus. However, if the claim that it’s a ‘chipset limitation’ is true, there could still be issues. Hard to say, though.
Due to the need to ensure security between the hub and devices, it is certainly possible that the chipset “locks” a critical key(s) away from API access by the controller. Whether that’s a “feature” or a “limitation” kinda depends on what you value most. And, if you figure out a way to “hack around” something iike that, your joy might be short-lived as that would be a bug they might “fix” at any time.
Thank you!
Nevertheless the way and the place to admit that one of the hottest feature of the long awaited (and announced) service will not be available let me worrying.
Bad communication habits
Bad communication habits is pretty much what turned me away from hubitat, it gets a little worrying when not one but multiple devs are driven off the platform over a 12 month period for unspecified “reasons”. This isn’t just limited to what has become this group.
It’s not just devs that were shown the door. It’s happened to staff to. Patrick made an unceremonious and silent exit. Everyone was left hanging, wondering why he wasn’t responding to messages.
Then it happened again. Chuck Schwer has also fallen into the Hubitat black hole.
That’s why I’m moving away as fast as I can.
Really? I hadn’t really clocked that, I’m more a lurker than a community member if I’m honest. Rather glad I’m getting things organised elsewhere.
TBH, that is def a risk with any small business.
You can get personality issues that interfere with things–and there’s always some turnover (even if nothing bad is going on).
I only ever see things by about 5 people in the forum there–and they each seem to somewhat have their own “lanes” in terms of the areas they work in.
Simply getting larger won’t guarantee those kinds of issues won’t happen (look at Uber and some of the other high-flying tech companies with corrosive leaders and how long it took to get things addressed). However, it’s almost a certainty that a very small business like Hubitat (even OhLaLabs) isn’t going to have the type of oversight and large, professionally trained HR department to intervene like a large corporation.
Quite a lot of speculation here guys. I didn’t see anything that suggested anyone left unhappy. And even if they did we don’t know the details or both sides of the story anyway. People come & go in any business. There are enough conspiracy stories on the planet without us starting another.
It’s not really speculation when it concerns observed fact, surely?
While I agree that there’s always two sides to a story I think it’s fair to say the people I’ve spoken to have been less than happy with the situation.
Either way, fact 1) useful (to me) dev projects have been closed out for non technical “reasons” and fact 2) I’m less than impressed with aspects of the hubitat hardware and support.
Of course, your mileage may vary 
Can you elaborate on this?
Not to speak for @srwhite, but to my limited understanding, Z-wave devices are paired to the “radio” not the hub. For the C-4 the radio is the stick. In theory you can pull the stick, put it any “hub” and the devices will still be attached to the stick. This is a very simplistic, interruption from someone that has never done it before, so take it with a grain a salt (the entire shaker!). I’ve only heard of the possibility.
That’s also my understanding, I’m only running a couple of Heimann Z wave outlets so I’ll yank the USB radio out of my C5 in a day or two in the spirit of scientific enquiry and confirmation.
The HUSBZB-1 stick stores enough information to restore both Zigbee and Z-Wave networks. I migrated one of my dead C-4 hubs to Home Assistant simply by plugging it into my HA server.
For Z-Wave the device stores the device list and routing table. You can literally plug the stick in and OpenZWave or ZWaveJS will see all of your devices (battery devices will need to be woken up to reconnect). The only caveat is that you need to know your Z-Wave encryption keys since they don’t live on the stick. Hubitat doesn’t make that info available, even though they easily could. That means that secure devices like locks have to be re-paired in order to work, but everything else just works.
For the Zigbee side of the device, Hubitat uses source routing so no device information is stored on the stick. But for security is opposite of ZWave… The network info (channel, ID, key, etc.) is stored on the stick and is used when connecting the stick to Home Assistant. Once connected, already paired ZB devices will be imported into Home Assistant as they check in with their coordinator.
For me it was a pretty simple process. The hardest part is identifying the devices since they won’t have any of the original naming.
It appears to have been released now for a price tag of $29.95/year which isn’t insane, about the cost of a family subscription to a password manager, but then again it is effectively a subscription plan to have them store your backups, which you could already do, but they are locking the easy automation behind a paywall, and an extended warranty. That being said the Z-Wave migration is nice since imo Z-Wave devices are a nightmare to deal with as far as pairing goes and some of us do not have external radios.
I just hope they make the backing up of non-radio items free to the public because every attempt I have made using cron-scheduled scripts to NR flows has fell on its face.
Is it just me or is this kinda ridiculously priced? Like you can get the exact same functionality from a RPi Zero W for $10 and free PiVPN, versus a recurring $36 a year. I guess technically this just creates a new cloud link for admin access which is different from switching your entire device to the VPN network, but you can basically get the same thing with split tunneling, but I have no clue if WireGuard can do that.
I fear we may see more of that, just like zero development of dashboard just use a SaaS instead.
Yeah not a fan of the “pay to play” moves here. Between these and the sharptools dashboard “recommendation”, it seems they are more concerned with connecting SaaS subscriptions than fixing the ever present problems. I can’t imagine these won’t create more “check-in” problems for those that do not want their IoT devices to have internet access. Personally I don’t think any tech I pay for needs to collect and distribute what I do with it to the internet.
I thought I was buying a “local solution”, but it seems more like a “local entry point” for more SaaS expenses.
Hub protect $30/year
Remote Admin $36/year
Sharptools $30/year
$96 dollars a year, No Thanks. It’s only a $150 hub ($129 currently). Why should I need to pay 60% of the full cost yearly for a few basic features that should be included. Oh wait extended warrantee? If you spend more in “insurance” than a devices is worth, what exactly are you gaining?
To think Wink only wanted $60/year and look at the fall out they got for it. I’ll say one thing, HE has done a better job of “selling it” to their community than Wink did. I guess that a plus??