The cartridge system certainly doesn't seem inconvenient, but given that they designed the system to hold at least 2-3L of water in a user refillable compartment, it slightly baffles the mind that holding 130mL of detergent and 35mL of rinse aid in a similar fashion was deemed impossible (or impractical).

From manufacturer's perspective, to make a user-refillable detergent/rinse container is against own interests all round:

- Give up on additional revenue;

- Costly to make machine more robust/tolerant to variations in composition/pH/viscosity/etc. of 3rd-party detergent;

- No good way to enforce rinse/calcite removal inside machine - without DRM, user can just pour water as "rinse" liquid, and then lie when RMAing the washer that eventually clogged up and broke.

Have you ever noticed at the pump that the nozzle for diesel doesn't fit in your car if it uses a gasoline engine? Try it some time. This is to prevent people who aren't paying enough attention from ruining their day by putting diesel in their car. It would be trivial to sell large commerical-grade detergent containers with similar protections to provide an affordable, fool-proof mechanism to refill their own cannisters. The best thing about this approach is that you could still provide the subscription based model to anyone who truly values the model (instead of being simply forced to use that model due to lack of a suitable alternative), giving your customers the best of all worlds. Obviously, that doesn't quite rake in the money the way that the "razor and blades" approach to gouging your customers in the name of convenience does.

Obviously anything that means you rake in less money is against the short-term interests of the sales department, but not necessarily the long-term interests of the company.

> This is to prevent people who aren't paying enough attention from ruining their day by putting diesel in their car.

FWIW this also protects against ignorant drivers who through no fault of their own have never filled up gas. Many countries are full service, as I believe are some US states?

Beats me why filling up gas is made out to be such a difficult task...

Per TFA:

>Credit where credit's due, Daan Tech didn't completely lock down the machine with Bob cassettes. Once empty, you can leave it there and add detergents manually.

If that was the true concern they'd have locked that up as well. They want you to pay for convenience, not for the warranty's sake.

I think noucermane is correct. Your point that there wasn't any software DRM does not mean that they did not intend it as DRM. I expect that they did a cost benefit analysis of additional electronics for SW DRM vs revenue lost due to hackers like this one for this version of their product, and found the tradeoff acceptable. This does not mean that if this hack became easily available and widely used, that they would not implement SW DRM on a later revision. Who knows, maybe the current version is already ready for SW DRM, it's just that they haven't felt the need to release the DRM version of the cartridge yet.

Given that they went out of their way to build an auto-renewal system in the device (a pretty sophisticated endeavor for a kitchen appliance manufacturer) it seems blatantly obvious that this lock-in was meant to prevent refills. Otherwise why not offer a manual override?

I have air filters that notify you when the filters should be checked or changed, I have coffee machines that tell you when you should descale them but they all let you override or ignore the issue if you so desire. And they're a lot less sophisticated than this device.

I'm not a fan of ad-hominem but I do agree with Symbiote that your take in a bit naive. You don't need to be a behemoth to embrace a crappy business model. Remember Juicero?

> You don't need to be a behemoth to embrace a crappy business model.

It's also the almost cliche case study in undergraduate business school. Known as the "Kodak" model or the "Gillette" model: "Give away the camera, sell the film" or "Give away the shaver, sell the blades" and while it's not an exact fit (I doubt they're selling the washer at cost) it's in the same vein.

I personally do think it their actions are deliberately exploitative. I don't inherently have a problem with offering users a 'more convenient' experience for a higher price, but there's absolutely no reason they couldn't sell their prefilled cartridges and also offer a refillable cartridge with a reset button, which can still tell you how many washes it has left. They also could absolutely sell the detergent directly to consumers, rather than implying it's some kind of secret sauce. Ultimately, this would cost almost nothing to engineer, and you wouldn't have to change the machine at all.

Their deceit is made more egregious by their supposed care for the environment.

I'd be interested in seeing the company's pitch deck. I wouldn't be surprised if they used the word "subscription" somewhere in their list of what makes them different from the competition.

I think investors are looking for the next Keurig. Sustainability be damned.

Look at the lengths Juicero went to create a subscription model for juice. Clearly there is a desire for that business model to be applied more broadly than just inkjet printers.

Absent any indications to the contrary, my default assumption is that we're seeing the same business model applied here.