I built an opener with an ESP8266. Cost five bucks, took a couple hours, no cloud, no drama. Thanks to Home Assistant and Homekit integration, anyone in the household can use it effortlessly.
I’ve had an IoTaWatt running for years without any issues. I’ve used it to pinpoint the exact time two refrigerator compressors failed. It’s been handy for all kinds of other stuff.
I had similar experiences with the earlier alpha/beta releases using a ton of CPU/RAM and having a ton of other issues, but lately it's been working quite well. I sync a lot of files, over 30GB, and Dropbox and Google Drive did a spectacularly poor job with that kind of load as well.
The iOS app for BTSync absolutely lets you browse your shares and download individual files. Otherwise I would not be able to use it.
My cloud server is a g1.small on GCE, and I run Sync inside Docker on that instance. The same server also runs a bunch of other crap, and it's far from resource constrained.
About once a year I went through the exercise of "let's try replacing Dropbox with something" and this time, with BTSync, I have been able to finally get rid of it, with the exception of a few mobile apps that rely on it.
I agree it could be more open, and I'm always on the lookout for a better solution, particularly one with similar encryption capabilities. If you haven't tried BTSync in a while, perhaps it's worth another look.
Sync still has room for improvement, but it does seem to be constantly improving.
Additionally, anyone with a gift card is entitled to shop there without a membership.
I don’t see how the burden on cashiers is changed.