We don't really know yet. Certainly, being able to unbrick devices has been helpful however, I'm sure a lot of folks have simply disconnected the devices and either threw them away or stuck them in the closet and not bothered to try to find out whether anything can be done about it. On the other hand, the bricking may have woken up a lot of people about the termination of the service and some of the more fanatical dash users have found us.
The real issue will be how many dash users would just use the device in an unsubscribed state vs those that choose to subscribe. I'm hearing a lot of folks say they just use the device for weather and alarm clock, and maybe music, and at this point, those offerings are likely to be entirely free, since our policy to date has been to only charge for access to the widgets.
Weather support, of the quality the dash has historically supported in the themes, does have recurring monthly costs associated with it.
So, if we end up with thousands of dash users just using the free tier, and very few subscribers, that will be an issue, and I may be forced to make changes to the way stuff is paid for. While it may sometimes appear to be the case, I'm not a charity - we're still here after all these years and able to do what we're doing for the dash because we are treating this like a business. It's also not fair for the chumby subscribers to subsidize the dash community.
Once thing that appears to be different between the chumby and dash ecosystem is that it seems there are many people with multiple dashes, which under the current scheme would all fall under the same subscription. It's one thing to have a two or three devices, another to have six or seven.
In the chumby world, we have both subscribed and unsubscribed users that make donations above and beyond what they're asked to do. I even have some folks that have multiple subscriptions they don't use, because that's the value they have in their mind about the service we offer. It remains to be seen whether that will be the case with the dash community. I don't think we can even speculate at this point, since they still going through the shock of the systems being turned off. The chumby folks had a different experience, because I was there through the whole process to let them know exactly what was going to happen, why and when.
Right now, we're concentrating entirely on the technical aspects of saving the ecosystem - without that, the rest of the discussion is moot.