In the case of the chip implants they still work as chip implants whether you pay for additional services or not.
The question is would you pay a service fee to keep the additional infrastructure for additional services running? Let’s call it a monthly service fee because it is paying for additional services rather than a subscription to use to your chip because it is not for the basic use.
I personally avoid all subscriptions and would not be open to a subscription plan
I was describing the framework and backstory of my initial reaction along with more generalized examples. Amal did help frame things a bit better with his replies.
I’d say that passwordless login, 2FA, and a password manager would be a worthwhile service to subscribe to. If any of those features cost more though, like the passwordless Google account, I don’t see that as worth paying much extra for. It’s literally just my login to other services, and only the ones who allow “login by Google” at that. Nothing for the other 150+ logins I keep in my password manager that don’t have that feature. Knowing just how many of those I have, the password manager being cryptobiologically secured would be awesome, so long as it has the same autofill and cross-device capabilities I’m used to. 2FA in comparison I only have on a dozen or so accounts, and while it’d be nice to have, is generally only used for a first login from a new device. I suppose locking Google Authenticator behind Vivokey would be useful, but I don’t know if that’s automatic with Enterprise/what Amal’s going for.
Otherwise the only things that’d be nice about the Spark/Apex is if they can do what another high frequency chip could do but better. So if they could unlock doors, start cars, login to computer, and make payments, all cryptobiologically secured. But if each and every different thing is now a separate feature, then I see them as being marketed as add-ons and used to justify higher and higher prices.
I just want the Future in the palm of my hand, is that too much to ask?? /s [insert “Position 0 isn’t technically in the palm” joke here]
No problem with fair prices for offerings from Vivokey, but I wouldn’t want to have to buy a ‘bundle’ if i only want one service.
For example if Vivokey Vault was the same price as Bitwarden or LastPass is, then I’d move across happily (accepting that the cost premium is in the hardware and not the software). If it was more expensive to use per month also then I’d be less inclined.
By the same token, paying for 4 services to get access to the 1 i want doesn’t make sense, so if the base subscription doesn’t offer value keeping that in mind I’d hope that individual services are available.
I’ve always been supportive of vivokey but I really have doupts on this one…
Even ignoring the ads vs subscription debate there are still some concerning things, ( for a post-poc google workspace account through vivokey, which is probably the main feature I would be interested in) :
First being, I already have a google account, with a million important things related to it. So unless there is a 1 step way to “upgrade” that account to a vivokey managed one I definitely not in. Even if there are convoluted ways of transferring stuff from one account to another… there’s just too much stuff (passwords, cloud storage, accounts, browsing hystories, search history, preferences, youtube channels…).
The second point is what if I use this new account for years and at some point something happens to vivokey and everything is shut down? Do I keep my account? Can I transfer back to a standard one as if nothing ever happened? Who guarantees that? I trust Google to not disappear in a day but Vivokey…? (No offense amal, purely based on company scale)
The last thing is… services ? That’s vague. Loging into websites and identification are the main things and integrating google in that is BIG step forward but what’s the rest about? You mentioned calendaring and messaging I think but these are services that are directly redundant of google services so what’s the benefit?
Otherwise you are always super clear about your intentions and open to feedback so GGs for that and I can’t wait to see new usecases for my spark and future vivokeys (yes I’m hyped about this despite complaining a lot 
).
PS: I would participate in the poc but I don’t see what I would do with a temporary google account other than have fun scanning my spark a couple times 
Apoyo este comentario, perfectamente lo pensaré y lo más probable esque devuelva mi paquete antes de abrirlo. No me instalaré un chip para pagar suscripción. 
Sign in with Google, many sites allow editing 3rd party logins later, so you can just use that for a while and it doesn’t matter it’s temporary, cuz you still have your old means of accessing the accounts.
Sorry to pester here, but the central question for most of us hasn’t been addressed that I have seen as yet:
Is there a plan, or is it even POSSIBLE to painlessly (or as little as possible, outside of the implant itself and the sunk costs) allow users to decouple from the eventual product? Is it too early to ask how you envision that working, or would that be more determined by the final form of the product?
From what I can tell it does sound like a Google account or similar (365, etc) would be required to enable the service, and they’re not usually friendly to migrating data/accounts.
To be frank, having experienced joblessness and even more dire economic circumstances, it’d be lovely if I wasn’t losing access to my life while losing my livelihood. It’d be awesome if there was some system that allowed it to be spun out to a separate Google account that simply lost Vivokey support or something.
You know, as I think about this, I think my disdain for subscriptions is purely a psychological one. I really despise it for software and it bleeds over to other things. Aside from the fact that multiple subscriptions can start adding up to a lot, It’s simply the fact that in my head, I want to do my research and make the one time investment for a product that will last me years and years to come.
In the software (SaaS) realm, I want to buy a package once and use it for as long as it serves my purpose. I don’t want to have to continually make payments for new features that I don’t want. If there is a bug, I shouldn’t have to pay to get it fixed.
My thought is slightly different when it comes to services. Whether I go for one or not is purely a subjective analysis of the value. I pay $50 a year for Lucidchart. I think that is a reasonable amount for the utility I get out of it. Recently google wants to move my grandfathered free Workspace accounts to paid accounts at $72 a year per user. My parents that are on a custom family domain in one of these legacy accounts certainly don’t want to pay that much. To me that is not worth it. Half that and I would consider it.
But when you mix making an investment in hardware that relies on third party services, I am super weary. I wanted a home power monitoring system and I just couldn’t get behind any of the commercial ones because they either had subscriptions or relied on their servers. I ended up spending more than I would have with a commercial unit, plus a lot of time, to get a completely self-hosted setup. Well worth it to me.
Since I’ve gone completely off the deep end, to bring it back around, I think we’d need to understand what the final service(s) would look like and how much it would be. I think there was some sticker shock for this PoC. Hopefully you get some takers but it’s a tough sell for a temporary account. I wouldn’t want to use it to sign up for anything so not sure how useful a PoC it would be.
Fully agree with that. I used some yoga-app for quite a while, and I actually liked it a lot - it wasn’t one of those fitness-heavy things with jumping people, but rather a bit more calm, slightly hippie-esque one. I finally, after using the free variant for some months, decided to actually buy it - and since I’m no fan of subsciptions, I chose the pay-once-get-all payment method (which was cheaper if I wanted to use the app for some more months anyways).
Guess what? After some more months, the app got an “upgrade”. All the older videos were gone, and instead it was “modernized” - thanks for nothing, now it was just the usual generic fitness app full of blonde-haired “fit” girls who shout at me for “just one more move” and such bullshit.
So the thing is, there is just no guarantee nowadays that the product you decide to buy stays the product you wanted to buy. And yes, gaming has many sad examples of that as well…
Plus, yeah, paying a subscription to use something that’s actually literally a part of your body doesn’t feel right as well - reminds me of those cyberpunk settings where you have to regularly pay for your augmented eyes to keep seeing and all that.
Same. But I think at that point there might be changes in society. There are people today who have prosthetics with electronics in them. If the device becomes ‘non-functional’ then the government might provide some kind of welfare to assist with replacing or fixing the prosthetic, because it’s considered a basic level of body autonomy. I can imagine regulations in place that would require optics to still be able to pass through basic light signalling, but might not have augmented reality without the subscription.
There’s also Neuralink working on the brain interfaces, and I remember well Elon laughing that they need to be extremely careful with firmware updates. I think it’s reasonable to expect that stuff like that would have a basic level of functionality at all times, and it’s something that will become regulated and enforced.
As for the change to VivoKey, I’m interested. I want to know what other functionality I can expect from an Apex Ring or Flex or Mega. I still can’t decide which to go for, but considering that we can and likely will lose the ring it’s probably not the best option for us. A subscription is a snag in the plan, but I feel at least somewhat worth it, depending on what services I’m paying for. A subscription makes way more sense, and it sounds like a good implementation.
I like the sound of the test program, and I’m excited for the google functionality.
Just putting in my opinion here as a consumer of biohacking products. For my uses the spark never did anything I wanted that I couldn’t do with my NExT. It had a UID I could use for access control, and the profile link never really appealed to me because I could just put a custom URL on my NExT.
Adding these options even as subscriptions is going to be the deciding factor and now I’m getting a Spark. I want that additional functionality, especially as it continues to grow. I understand that I may lapse in payments or even stop using the services entirely, and then my implant “loses” utility while it’s still a part of my body. It still does all the basic functions we expect from our current NFC implants though. The only things I could lose are things I never previously had.
I’ve come to terms with subscription models in some settings. It costs to make and maintain software and services. I’m just selective about which ones I use. If this one could replace others for me, the price may make sense and the convenience would be worth it. If it ends up not being worth it then worst case we’re back where we started with an NFC implant.
EDIT: I had another thought I wanted to add. I’m down for subscriptions for third party services or even first party services that vivokey builds and maintains. The spark doesn’t have those functionalities built in, it just plugs into them. Where I would have an issue would be in an arena like health data where the hardware is permanently within the device, but you put a paywall up in order to unlock the device and get that functionality. That’s why I’m not a fan of the way Dsruptive is running their temperature sensor program it’s like holding the consumer hostage. I would want at least a basic level of functionality that is always available offline without fees because the hardware is there. If Amal or anyone else suggested moving to that model for sensor implants I would push back hard. Only the external online components of the implant should be fee based because they cost.
On the upside I assume you get the 2TB cloud storage from the Google Workspace which I’m personally already paying for in Google Drive so if all the other issues are adressed I won’t have to pay for Drive storage anymore…
Edit: Kinda concerned about this too :
Gmail users have full administrative control over their email and Google Account login credentials. Google Workspace grants you administrative control — including the ability to create, edit and delete accounts — over all Gmail addresses created using Google Workspace.
Thanks everyone for a lively debate. There are many comments I could quote specifically and respond to but right now I don’t have the bandwidth or proper interface as I’m yelling into my mobile phone voice to text converter while traveling.
I’m trying to be very careful about discussing future platform features because those are just not a good idea to talk about right now. I’m trying to learn my lesson about discussing things like that which are not yet developed and basically putting myself into a position of having to backtrack or change plans simply because we talked through ideas that some people may consider to be promises.
The proof of concept, on the other hand, is exactly as presented. Not everybody’s going to love the price of it and there are issues of course with offering Google workspace accounts… everyone has identified very important and accurate problems in this area. But, the reason for the POC is not to explore the practicality of Google workspace accounts as subscription model services, it’s to explore the practicality of chip based authentication with Google SSO in general. There are real usability things we need to explore, and in the end the actual service platform we may develop will undoubtedly use this information to shape its development and feature set.
Personally I have a lot of things that I want to deploy that require a new service platform and so I really personally want to see this developed… But again it’s been several years since VivoKey has come into existence and so far, I’m pretty sure everyone would agree It’s been a categorical failure. Ideas and intentions and aspirations are not matching reality, and I realize the extreme levels of patients people have is nothing short of saintly. What are you don’t want to do is talk about making more promises and talking about the future and I want to try to get away from the whole soon™ concept in general. I want to deliver.
To that end, the proof of concept we’re talking about is absolutely going to be temporary. The entire purpose is to learn before taking first steps. Undoubtedly that’s going to be a messy process and in the end it’s going to be burnt to the ground so that whatever we build from the ashes will have the advantage of that knowledge. This is the clarity I want to offer anyone wanting to participate in the POC. It’s not representative of anything, it’s an experiment.
I should have mentioned something like this,
If the chip is still useable, more than just a uid like an expired payment card
I don’t have a issue in principle paying for external “bonus” features… that are frankly over my head
Case in point, I love popl as a contact sharing method. If they went to a subscription platform I probably wouldn’t pay for it as there are plenty of free options, but I don’t have an issue with with it in principal,
My implants are part of my body,
my implant points to popl,
But popl is not part of my body
You treat us like you’d like to be treated, so we treat you in kind, it’s as simple as that
I think I can safely say… this group of people putting dangerous things in their body to push the limits and boundaries are receptive to experiments
This is perfect. I would love to help out but I don’t have a Vivokey spark. The Apex ring has not afaik been released yet. If there is a way to take part without an implant I would be more than happy to (I do have a pair of Vivokey dev kit cards). Otherwise I am going to have to wait until such time as I have an implant.
As I have said, at the moment I am particularly interested in OAUTH2 or SAML, and those definitely seem to be the sorts of services that would be offered as part of an RFID based identification/authentication system.
Is it possible DT will arrange a webinar/video to help set up the spark APIs for the none technical member?
yep we will have a whole walk-through shortly
Is it too late to sign up for the PoC test program?