Tigo responds

It didn’t take long before I got a response from Tigo when I complained about needed a subscription to my data. I got emails from both the cofounder, Ron Hadar, and the VP of Professional Services, Scott McCalmont. Ron’s email came in around noon and Scott’s followed soon afterward.

I give points to both Ron and Scott for their quick, personal responses. Both of them acknowledged my viewpoint but emphasized their need to run a business. Scott’s response barely hid his contempt, however, which is not what I would expect from someone in a customer-facing role:

For example, we send an alert to customers when their Management Unit goes offline. You clearly don’t think this is useful or valuable, but many customers do.

On the other hand, I am an irritated, snarky customer and my type is not always fun to deal with, so touché.

Perusing the Tigo forums, I see other Tigo owners are also unhappy with the subscription aspect:

Here’s one:

weswada 3 months ago
Free monitoring ending – message when logging in
Last week Tigo Support had to reset my entire system and now I’m starting over with layout changes.

Now I get ‘your free monitoring trial service will be ending…’ message.

Residential under 10kW is free, according to Tigo documentation.

How do I remove this?

Tigo responded thusly:

Jessica (Employee) 3 months ago
Hello,

Unfortunately, we do not provide free monitoring for systems under 10kW. All monitoring after the free 90-day trial is a paid service, unless the system was purchased through one of our qualified partners who are able to offer free partner-level monitoring. Would you mind pointing us toward any documentation which may have given you this impression?

Then another user chimes in:

Steven B 4 days ago
Oh, really?! I’m glad I decided to check out this community! I’m considering a DIY upgrade of the system on my roof to incorporate Tigo and was planning to buy the parts myself.

I don’t see any discussion of the monitoring service on Tigo’s website. How can I get more information about how much this monitoring service costs? Can I build a Tigo system without the monitoring? How might I find an installer who would offer free monitoring?

Steven is right. There is no information on Tigo’s website about the monitoring requiring a subscription. All that’s shown is a comparison box which has a checkbox in the “monitoring” row. Nowhere does it mention that the user has to pay for this. I wonder if my installer even knew about the subscriptions.

Another user found himself locked out of his own data:

Fadi Diab Fadi Diab 1 month ago
No longer have access to data I have paid for.
I have paid $375 for full access to my monitoring data with the installation of my system for 5 years. Now 16 months later I have been downgraded so I can no longer see more than 30 days worth of data. A new ‘upgrade’ tab shows up in my control panel with various options for payment to restore full functionality.

Another user asked the question I did (in Google Translate-English), namely, what happens if Tigo goes out of business?

Decroes José 4 months ago
What will happen in case of bankruptcy administrator
Hello
In fact, I have the installation but Tigo program allows the installer to my monitor
I do not have all the possibilities of the site

Que se passe-t-il en cas de faillite de l’administrateur
En effet, Je possède l’installation mais le programme Tigo permet à mon installateur de la surveiller

Another user ran into problems at a site with no Internet:

Irv Collier 6 months ago
Too bad the Tigo Technical help line didn’t know this when I called for help. I was unable to get internet service to my site for several months and had severe erratic power fluctuations leaving me with poor power output. Was told by tech dept that nothing could be done.

Another one would like real-time monitoring, which seems like a reasonable request to me:

Paul Thompson 6 months ago
Real-Time Monitoring ?
Hi, i want real time power monitoring, the system now only updates what seems to be every hour. how can i fix this? I want it to update close to real time. OR is there a way to directly connect to the management unit? please provide a solution.

Unfortunately, there’s no good way to do this. Tigo’s response:

Jacob Jackson (Employee) 5 months ago
Hello Paul

Right now, there is no way to get real time data automatically uploaded to your summary screen. There is a way to manually force your summary screen to display the most recent information. If you go to your MMU, enter the main menu, select the 2nd option, “Control”, and then select “Push data”, you will push all new data collected by the MMU to the summary screen.

That user really wants to do what I’d like to do: gather data directly from the management unit. Only getting hourly updates seems pretty lame. I can understand throttling data like this if you don’t want to overload your datacenter, but why not push this functionality to the endpoints: the boxes already at the customer sites? There’s bundles of network bandwidth on my 100Mb home network.

If Tigo wants to provide an API that lets the owner query their MMU directly that would be awesome. If Tigo wanted to drop subscriptions completely that would be awesome. It is 2013, after all, and cloud computing makes hosting backends cheap.

I guess the subscription is a part of Tigo’s business plan and won’t be changing. I’m not likely to ever be pleased about being shut out of the data that the product I thought I purchased is generating.

For now, Tigo and I will agree to disagree.