DropCam

» see dropcam.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

dropcam's peak years overlap with my own line of work, but only the way a neighboring building does, the architecture made some sense from the outside without ever being something i would buy. the product was a small wifi camera that did one thing well: it streamed your living room to a server in oregon so you could watch it from a phone. that idea is everywhere now. dropcam was the first version of it that people actually trusted enough to point at their own kitchen.

greg duffy and aamir virani started it in 2009 out of y combinator. it landed at exactly the moment cheap wifi cameras stopped being a project for geeks and became a product you bought at best buy without thinking about it. the company did the unglamorous work of making one that just worked. you plugged it in once, and the rest lived in the cloud. by 2013 revenue was growing 500 percent year over year, with about forty percent of users paying for cloud recording on top of the hardware. nest bought the company in june 2014 for 555 million dollars. soon after, google bought nest.

in april 2023 google announced the original dropcams would lose cloud service on april 8 2024. fourteen years after the first one shipped, every working dropcam in the world became a paperweight on the same morning. duffy has since called the nest sale a mistake. you can read that as personal regret about a number. roughly. the wider point sits beside it: a camera that lives entirely off someone else's server farm dies when that server farm decides it has moved on. i was not on the receiving end of any of those shutdown emails. but the shape of it sits next to what i work on now, which is the opposite bet, video on devices that try to think locally so the server farm has less to take away.

~ the dossier ~

~ how it landed ~

the dropcam pitch was almost insultingly simple in 2009. anyway, you wanted to see your dog from the office. existing options at the time were a security-system installer or a soldering iron. dropcam said: open the box, plug it in, point the app at it, done. the camera was small and matte and looked like an apple accessory. the company sold cloud recording on a subscription on top, so the longer you owned it, the more you paid them. that was the part the early reviews never quite focused on, which became the part that defined the entire shutdown later.

~ what it became ~

the nest acquisition in 2014 was the moment dropcam stopped being a startup and became a feature of a bigger plan. nest had the thermostat, then it had the smoke detector, then it had a camera company. the dropcam name kept appearing on hardware for another year or so before the nest cam took over and the original brand was retired in everything but the firmware. inside google, after google bought nest in turn, dropcam was the camera nobody quite wanted to be responsible for. it kept running because turning it off was a customer-relations problem nobody wanted to handle. for almost a decade, that calculation held.

~ what got buried with it ~

the april 2024 shutdown was paired with the nest secure shutdown the same week, the two consumer iot deaths google had been deferring at the same time. for whatever reason, both products were old enough that the server-side cost of keeping them alive had stopped looking worth the engineering. owners of working hardware had no upgrade path that did not involve buying a new camera. some of those cameras had been sitting on shelves and pointing at sleeping babies for thirteen years without complaint. the lesson of the dropcam death was the one already in the air for anyone paying attention to consumer iot: the camera in your house is rented, and the landlord has the on-off switch.

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