What's Wrong with Meraki? Black Box Technologies, Lock-In, & Hidden Costs.

Once or twice a week I get the question, "I'm thinking about using Meraki's equipment, what do you think?" And I always start my answer much the same way. [As a disclaimer, I've known the Meraki folks since their time back at MIT -- my development teams used to collaborate actively with them.]

Meraki is a great system for quick do-it-yourself networking. The technology is elegant and the graphical user interface (mostly) intuitive. If you want a plug-and-play technology immediately deployed, it's a good solution. But that is far from the whole story.

As many of my readers know, I've been advocating for open tech for years and years -- so how does Meraki stack up? The core technologies in Meraki are open source -- but they've been smothered in a proprietary wrapper that makes Meraki little different from most "black box" solutions. Users can't easily view the code, change features (or add features, for that matter), fix bugs, or otherwise adapt the technology for their own uses. As a number of open source projects have discovered, even gaining access to information that was covered by existing open source licenses has become increasingly difficult as Meraki has become increasingly proprietary.

Most people think Meraki's back-end is free. They are wrong. In fact, Meraki plans to eventually charge for the use of their services. As the recent GovTech article reported, Meraki founder stated explicitly that their solution "includes three years of its data center services in the price of the hardware." For those who forget, Meraki's hardware used to cost $49 for an indoor node, then the cost went up to $149 -- if you wanted more equipment, you had to pay a rate three times as much, and since Meraki's equipment is sole-sourced, you had to pay whatever they charged.

I fully expect that we're going to see the same problem with Meraki's back-end services. Most users (and certainly just about everyone in the general public) thinks that once you buy a wireless access point that it will continue to work indefinitely (or at least until the hardware fails). With Meraki, however, you're getting a package of hardware and software -- and you can't run a Meraki network without Meraki's proprietary back-end. So how much with the service cost at the end of your 3-year "free" period? I have no idea (though if you know, please let me know). And what happens if you've been a Meraki network over that 3-year period and are now about to get a huge monthly charge? Probably you'll either have to pay whatever they cost or your network will cease to work.

Hundreds of projects, organizations, and municipalities are rolling out Meraki-based networks, yet few seem to understand that they're buying a service not a piece of hardware. Over time, these initiatives will end up paying an unknown amount of money to Meraki just to keep their system running. It is, in fact, the ultimate bait-and-switch paradigm -- you think you have a one-time hardware cost, instead you get vendor lock-in, recurring charges, and path dependencies.

These and other reasons are why it remains so important to support and utilize truly open technologies. The simulacrums are getting better and better -- but inevitably you're getting a worse deal than you think.