My Garage Door Has a Subscription Model Now
My Garage Door Has a Subscription Model Now
Somewhere along the way, my garage door got a business model. I didn’t agree to this. Nobody asked me. One day Chamberlain just decided that opening the thing I bought, attached to the house I own, should involve their cloud, their app, and eventually their subscription.
This is the story of how I fired them.
The hostage situation
It started with myQ, Chamberlain’s “smart” platform. For a while it worked fine — phone app, open the door from the driveway, feel like the future. Then they killed the free API. Then the Home Assistant integration broke. Then came the strong hints that if you wanted your garage door to talk to anything, you’d be paying monthly for the privilege.
Let me say that again slowly: a monthly fee. To open. My own. Garage door.
No HomeKit. No local API. Every command routed through their servers, because nothing says “smart home” like needing a data center’s permission to park your car.
Enter the lockpick
The open-source community, bless them, does not like being extorted. Someone built ratgdo — a tiny ESP32 board that plugs into the opener and speaks its native Security+ protocol directly. No cloud. No account. No subscription. Just your garage door, finally answering to you.
Thirty-ish dollars of pure defiance.
The install
I put one on each door — left and right. Suddenly Home Assistant could see everything: door state, obstruction sensor, motion. The ratgdo even does vehicle detection with an ultrasonic sensor, so the house knows whether the car is actually parked or just visiting.
Then came the fun part. Automations:
- Midnight auto-close. Because I am the person who leaves it open.
- Late-night alert. “Hey. HEY. The garage.” At 11 PM, like a concerned parent.
- iPad buttons to close either door from the kitchen.
My garage went from a hostage of the cloud to the most obedient room in the house.
The moral
Chamberlain looked at a garage door opener — a solved problem, a box with a motor — and thought: “What if this were SaaS?” And the internet thought: “What if it weren’t?”
Every time a company turns hardware you own into a service you rent, someone solders the alternative in their garage. The future is open, local, and subscription-free. My garage door agrees. It told me so — locally, without phoning home.