WTF

Take Back Ownership of What You Bought

July 25, 2026

You spent $400 on a smart garage door opener. Then another $30 for the myQ hub to make it actually smart. Then in November 2023, Chamberlain flipped a switch and blocked every third-party app from talking to your own garage door. Home Assistant, Apple Home, Google Home, SmartThings, IFTTT, all of it dead overnight.

Great X post from @heynavtoor on the Chamberlain story

Chamberlain's CTO (Dan Phillips) called it "unauthorized usage." Said it would improve the experience for their 10 million users -> and seriously who really believes that this is the reason. Home Assistant removed the integration weeks later and told users to find something else. (home-assistant.io, November 2023) BTW, I was an early supporter of SmartThings before Samsung bought them, so I am all for open source, open protocols, and openness in general.

Amazon Key in-garage delivery still works though at $1.99 per order that Amazon pays Chamberlain and you don't.

I am less fussed about companies that have their own app. You know what you are getting yourself into at the onset. You hope that at some point in time they will join Matter and if that doesn't happen, it is what it is. HOWEVER, when a company allows their system to be used by multiple platforms and then pulls the rug out from their users, the users that spent money on their systems and then claims that they are doing it for you - that should be a WTAF moment.

Now if they wanted to drop the price and are upfront with their users - that's a little more honest.

Let's dig a little deeper into this story - things aren't always what they seem

In 2021 Blackstone acquired Chamberlain Group for approximately $5 billion through its core private equity strategy. (Blackstone press release, November 2021) You know, the kind that invests in companies specifically to scale their software and connected services into new revenue streams. The press release said it would help Chamberlain "capitalize on connectivity megatrends." Two years later, those megatrends had a name: blocking third-party access and routing 10 million customers through a single controlled app ecosystem.

Chamberlain wasn't a struggling company looking to be rescued, they were selling a profitable, successful company. The Duchossois family had owned and operated it for over 40 years, with more than $1 billion in annual revenue and third-generation family members inside the business. (Crain's Chicago Business, 2021) You don't sell a thriving family business for $5 billion because you have to and Blackstone didn't buy them to save them, they bought them to change their model based on a template.

This is not an isolated theme. Let's simplify it (I like simple things as they get to the point).

This was a hardware company that was acquired specifically to become a software and services company. The hardware is the trojan horse, the garage door opener is the hook, and the API Access keeps you in the building.

Paul Wieland put it plainly:

"You should own the hardware, and there is a line there that a lot of companies are experimenting with. I'm really afraid for the future that consumers are going to swallow this and that's going to become the norm." — Paul Wieland, ratgdo

Well said Paul BUT I am not afraid, it is happening, and it's happening all over the place - remember John Deere and the slow death of owning things, and its more of a trend than most realize.

BMW charges monthly fees for heated seats, then reversed after significant backlash. (TechCrunch, 2023) Sleep trackers paywall your own health data. Printers reject third-party ink unless you maintain subscriptions. Futurehome, a smart home hub maker, went bankrupt in 2025 and immediately converted its one-time purchase product into a $116 annual subscription. Users who didn't pay lost the ability to control their own devices (Ars Technica, 2025) and the list keeps growing:

  • John Deere — locked farmers out of their own tractor repair software
  • Peloton — removed the "Just Run" feature from the Tread+ for users without an active subscription. (Pelo Buddy, 2021)
  • Sonos — ended software updates for legacy speakers in 2020, then a 2024 app update effectively bricked thousands of systems. (Fortune, 2020)
  • Roku — added advertising to the home screen of devices people had already purchased
  • Keurig — tried to DRM coffee pods (K-Cup 2.0) to prevent third-party pods from working in machines people already owned
  • Ring — end-to-end encryption paywalled behind a subscription on hardware people already bought
  • Toyota — a class action lawsuit filed in 2026 alleges Toyota collected and sold driving behavioural data from vehicles dating back to 2018 without adequate consent, sharing it with insurance companies. The suit claims violations of the Federal Wiretap Act and the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. (court reporting, February 2026)

Greed, Incompetence, or you will "Own Nothing"?

I am pretty sure it's not incompetence, but the other 2, yeah.

Hardware margins are thin and getting thinner. Manufacturing costs, supply chain volatility, retail distribution, warranty support. The economics can be brutal. A garage door opener that sells once for $400 and then requires no further revenue is a bad business by private equity standards. A garage door opener that sells once for $400 and then generates recurring API access fees, data from 10 million connected homes, and a captive distribution channel for Amazon deliveries, that's a model, well a model they like.

It isn't just about making good hardware, it's about how can they source their parts better. I see what is in these door openers and they are very simple. To wit, I bought a $30 controller with wifi that acts as the button in my garage to open and close the hardware. It works. They could have focused more on areas like working with other platforms, creating SDKs that people have to pay for, looking at API calls as a cost. There are many ways to make the business better that I can think of, and I am not that bright. The new business model was bolted on as an easy solution - back to rinse and repeat. That is the typical way that a company like Blackstone works and they certainly don't look at the intrinsic value, instead look for the "flip it fast" model.

Blackstone didn't buy Chamberlain because they wanted to sell garage door openers. They bought it because Chamberlain had 10 million connected devices already installed in homes, a dominant market position, and a consumer base that was largely locked in by switching costs. Ten million is not a hardware business it's a data business with a hardware wrapper. The third-party blocking wasn't a product decision. It was a monetisation decision made by people who think in terms of recurring revenue multiples, not user experience.

And here is the "conspiracy fact" worth naming: connected devices in your home collect data, you data and to them (as it should be for you) your data is valuable. Insurance companies, retailers, real estate platforms - there is a market for aggregated behavioural data from 10 million connected homes. The Toyota lawsuit is the visible version of what happens when that data monetisation goes wrong. (court reporting, February 2026)

Enter ratgdo

Paul Wieland is a 44-year-old IT professional from New York's Adirondack Mountains. In 2022 he built a prototype Wi-Fi board that plugged into his garage door opener and gave him local control with no cloud and no subscription. He hoped to sell 100 units to recoup expenses. He sold tens of thousands.

He named it ratgdo. Rage Against the Garage Door Opener.

ratgdo is a Wi-Fi control board that wires directly to your door opener's terminals, giving you local ESPHome, HomeKit, or dry contact control plus full status feedback for virtually any garage door opener including Security+ 2.0 Chamberlain and LiftMaster openers. No cloud, no subscription and the firmware is open source and free.

$62 for the finished board that uses under $10 in parts if you build it yourself.

  • Firmware updated four days ago as of this writing.
  • 1,264 stars on GitHub. GPL-2.0. He's since built a company and is continuing by building the same fix for the rest of your locked-down smart home hardware.

The New York Times profiled him in December 2025. (NYT, December 2025) The Verge, Ars Technica, and Hackaday all pointed readers straight at his board.

One IT guy in the Adirondacks vs. a Blackstone-owned corporation with 10 million customers. Still on GitHub for us to use.

He's not alone

Linus Torvalds created Linux in 1991 which is an open source, free, do with it what you will operating systems for computers. Plenty of businesses have been built on open source. Linux now runs 96% of the world's servers, every Android phone, and most of the internet's infrastructure. (Linux Foundation) Tesla released all of its patents in 2014 and gives the plans away for free for anyone that wants it, because he believes in competition. (Tesla blog, 2014) OpenWRT exists because consumer router manufacturers lock down hardware people own so a community built open source firmware that gives users back control of their own routers. ESPHome which is the same platform ratgdo runs on, built specifically to give local control back to smart home users being locked out of their own devices. Klipper is open source 3D printer firmware, built because manufacturers restricted what users could do with printers they purchased. (I use klipper btw)

Every major open source project starts with someone being blocked from doing something with hardware or software they owned. ratgdo is not an anomaly. It's the latest in a very long line.

The uncomfortable question

I read this post on X (mentioned at the top of the post) and the last line made me laugh, but hits home as well:

"But DO NOT install it. Chamberlain deserves your $30 for the privilege of blocking you from your own garage."

I've been thinking about that line. Because the real issue isn't Chamberlain specifically, it's why do we keep accepting the premise that buying hardware means renting access to it.

The Right to Repair movement is one response. ratgdo is another. Open source firmware, local control, GPL licences that explicitly prohibit the kind of proprietary lock-in Chamberlain deployed are all different answers to the same question: who actually owns the thing you paid for?

I think you get my opinion on this. I just can't understand how there aren't people yelling about this online, pissed off at the fact that everything worked great and now it doesn't, unless you pay (is "extortion" the right word here?).

Maybe it's more of a problem for people like me that are technically apt. We know and have seen this pattern becoming more and more "mainstream" over the last two decades. Maybe the general consumer doesn't care. My gut, they will once it starts impacting their day-to-day. There will be a straw that breaks the camel's back, I just don't know what straw. The Toyota example hit more people probably than the garage door opener.

Sources