What puts you off about IoT Services?

I agree with the comments from Nico and some others. Just to add some background on my thoughts around cloud versus local, it came from building and tested my first cloud service (it wasn't IoT). It was initially prototyped on a PC. Today a Pi would be suitable for that too. My service was for a retail store, and we considered all the options, running it on a server on a site, or at my home : ) or using a provider. In the end, the decision was unanimous (despite initial reservations from the customer - this was approx 8 years ago when many were wary of cloud for security reasons).

The cloud cost (just using IaaS at that time, which isn't always efficient) was ballpark $15 a month (actually it was free for a year), which the customer had no issue paying, I built it into the service cost. It eliminated me needing to open up ports and dealing with security issues and upgrades, and I didn't need to deal with any equipment failure. For any second customer (although I only had 1 customer!) there would be half the cost (almost - unless more resources are needed) if it is multi-tenanted.

For a home app initially using a cloud option can be perceived to make no sense, but if one day you want to turn it into a business connecting more devices, to me it seems it's better to to take the hit and experiment with a platform from a provider that will be there in ten years time (as opposed to using a smaller hobby provider), even if the learning curve is higher initially.

I agree with the comments from Nico and some others. Just to add some background on my thoughts around cloud versus local, it came from building and tested my first cloud service (it wasn't IoT). It was initially prototyped on a PC. Today a Pi would be suitable for that too. My service was for a retail store, and we considered all the options, running it on a server on a site, or at my home : ) or using a provider. In the end, the decision was unanimous (despite initial reservations from the customer - this was approx 8 years ago when many were wary of cloud for security reasons).

The cloud cost (just using IaaS at that time, which isn't always efficient) was ballpark $15 a month (actually it was free for a year), which the customer had no issue paying, I built it into the service cost. It eliminated me needing to open up ports and dealing with security issues and upgrades, and I didn't need to deal with any equipment failure. For any second customer (although I only had 1 customer!) there would be half the cost (almost - unless more resources are needed) if it is multi-tenanted.

For a home app initially using a cloud option can be perceived to make no sense, but if one day you want to turn it into a business connecting more devices, to me it seems it's better to to take the hit and experiment with a platform from a provider that will be there in ten years time (as opposed to using a smaller hobby provider), even if the learning curve is higher initially.