Regarding tech support:
Each Sense purchase is a one-time $300 revenue event. There’s probably $50-100 worth of manufacturing cost in the hardware, packaging, etc. at the volumes they’re doing. Distribution and shipping costs- $20? The developers and engineers that are bringing the tech to reality are expensive people. That’s maybe another $50 in development costs at these (admittedly unknown) volumes? AWS and other infrastructure maintenance costs to crunch the numbers in the back-end hosted systems for the life of the customer. $20? $100? All of the other normal business overhead: sales/marketing, office staff, financial management, legal, etc.
I think it’s amazing they’re providing the level of tech support they are. It’s not typical in this cloud services industry segment and until people start warming up to a monthly fee to keep the service going, it’s probably not going to change. Compared to Samsung SmartThings, Nest, etc. I don’t think Sense is slacking in the support department.