What does an appliance solution like Pluto cost?
From Pluto Wiki
Appliance solutions are normally quite expensive. The most popular combination is:
- Crestron system to do all the home automation. The cost varies depending on what you want to do with it, but a whole-house solution including touch-screen panels will set you back at least $25,000 for an entry-level system, and can easily hit 6 figures.
- Kaleidescape for the DVD movie server, costing $27,000 for the main server, and $4,000 for each TV where you want to watch movies.
- Escient Fireball for the music server, costing $5,000 for the central music server.
- A pbx phone system with voicemail, like Panasonic will cost another 5 grand or so.
All of those products require professional installation and setup, particularly the home automation devices. Pluto was designed with simple web-based wizard so even non-techies can get a whole solution up within a few hours. But our competitors' products are different. The smart home dealers will confirm they require a trained programmer to set them up. For example, it can take weeks of programming to setup a Crestron system in a good-sized house, and the programming fees can be over $10,000, plus re-programing fees every time you make a change. Bottom line: around $100,000 for an appliance solution that does what Pluto does.
The appliance solutions are typically PC's running the Linux O/S and custom software, but they are put inside custom cases. And you can never get the software separately, so there's no way to economize or build your own.
Pluto has taken a different approach. Pluto is an appliance solution. However we do make the software available separately, and in fact give it away for free, so techies and software programmers can build their own high-end appliance system for free. And, as an open system, competing PC hardware manufacturers can license the Pluto platform for standard, low-cost PC's. Pluto brings down the cost even more by offering all the functionality in 1 system: whole house media & entertainment, home automation, telecom, security, and personal computer. So, you only need 1 Pluto system, rather than a hodge-podge of different systems.
