How to get a refund from Securifi

[sleepingpython]

Hi all

There's alot of good things and bad things going on in the forum. Someone people love the almond+, some people are utterly disappointed.

I don't hate it, but I am utterly disappointed by the speed of the router performing at 802.11n speeds.

Yes i have sat down with tech support. I have even sat down at 1am my time to try and let them install some experimental firmware (which failed miserably).

The reality is I was sold on the concept of the 802.11ac router at <USD100. It works as a router, just not as a 802.11ac one.

Since R066 emerged on 19 September 2014 (actually, i have been speaking to tech support since R065), i have been advised by Ashok and team to be patient. One day, i just decided to go out and buy an Asus AC68 router. I have a 1gbps internet connection at home and it was no longer an issue about patience. In summary, my connection speed jumped from 170-200mbps to upwards of 500-600 mbps (straight line distance of 8m from the router + a wall/door inbetween).

In the middle of all that, i received refund instructions from Securifi on 2 October 14 - sadly, i am expected to pay postage (approximately USD20 from where i am to send it to Taipei) to get a refund. I figured that i would wait a month to think about all this and give securifi a chance to come up with a new update to the firmware. I guess it did not happen.

So here's the refund instructions i received from Ashok (note that i have already pre-warned him about my intent to make sure all backers having the same right to obtaining a refund).

If you are unhappy with the Almond+ go ahead and contact them for a refund. My router works, just not as advertised, and they agreed to a refund. I don't see why this should be kept from everyone.

Cheers

(refund details below)

_______________________
Dear ___,

Thank you for choosing Securifi Almond+.

Please accept my sincere apologies for the late response, I took some time to see if we could do something better for you. However, it seems like we cannot refund the shipping charges, because it has gone to our courier company. Meanwhile, as we have a control of providing you full refund that is the max we can do for you here. Please send the Almond+ to the following address and let us know the tracking information, so that I can cascade that to our concerned to process the refund to your PayPal account. Thank you for all your time and patience in working with us. Thank you!

<Personal address details deleted by admin>

[LGNilsson]

Well, in as much that I'm sorry to hear about your problems, we're working on rectifying things.
It's taken longer than we hoped for and what they tried to install was not an "experimental" firmware as you put it, it was a beta firmware which included new Wi-Fi drivers that really improves the Wi-Fi performance of the Almond+. I don't know why they were unable to install it on your Almond+, but that's a different matter entirely.

I can fully understand your frustration, but please consider that you didn't purchase a retail product, you backed a Kickstarter project. It's not fair to have the same expectations on a Kickstarter project as you would on a retail product. That said, yes, we do have a lot of issues that still needs to fixed and I'll be the first to admit that. By now I was hoping that we would've had a new firmware release out, but we don't fix just one thing per firmware and this means that it takes a bit longer sometimes. We've had some issues with the new Wi-Fi driver that are now mostly solved and we hope to have a new firmware shortly.

As for refunds, considering that this is a Kickstarter project, we're actually under no obligation to refund anyone, since as so many like to put it, you didn't purchase anything, you invested in an idea. That said, we've refunded everyone that's asked for a refund so far, but we simply can't eat the shipping costs as well, since sometimes the shipping is more than the value of the product itself. We're not being unreasonable, but there's a limit to what can be considered reasonable costs for us to carry as well.

As for you copying and pasting in personal emails in the forum with the contact details and email address of one of our employees that is not part of the support team, is on the other hand not acceptable and as such the contact details were removed. This is a public forum, so please think before posting things like that in any public forum, no-one likes to have their email address being hijacked for spam purposes.

I hope we can provide that the Almond+ was worth your investment, even if  you feel disappointed right now. We're aware that there are issues, but we're working hard on solving them and as per your email to Ashok, yes, we did promise benchmark figures and we never posted them. I'll get some posted based on the new firmware compared to the old firmware as well as compared to some other routers, but it's going to take a bit of time to get the testing done.

[xaminmo]

I see this as a great hardware product, with OpenWRT,
and a pretty overlay, that is in alpha/beta pre-release.
The great bulk of the functionality is there and working.

The price is competitive, even being a prototype product.
I'm sure that there are plenty of people who would buy your router as-is for what you paid.

You might also reconsider in the future whether buying pre-release prototypes is the right choice for you.
It may give you better peace of mind to stay with full-release products.

-JD

[sleepingpython]

It's clear alot of people here have differing views on whats acceptable from a kickstarter project.

I came in today to take a look at the state of the firmware as of R069, i guess wifi optimisations are still not ready.

I have tried to sell it but when asked why, i fess up and simply tell them that it can't reach 802.11ac speeds. So who in the right mind buys a 802.11ac router when it does not perform 802.11ac standards?

I will never be able to meet eye2eye with Securifi staff on my point above. The reality is I now have a functioning Asus, i no longer have to deal with unstable firmwares and long tech support calls into 1am in the morning.

Next year, when my new place is ready, the Almond+ could possibly be the main router in my new place (or maybe as an extender/AP). Maybe. Right now, it's sitting in it's box in storage.

Anyway, i hope everyone is doing well and happy thanksgiving everyone!

 

[LGNilsson]

The next firmware will have new drivers and it'll fix the Wi-Fi issues, at least everything we've managed to reproduce.
There are reasons why the Almond+ isn't for sale as yet, this being one of them.
You're right though, we're not meeting 802.11ac speeds at the moment, at least not beyond 1x1 speeds and it's a fair complaint.
The next firmware looks like it won't be quite there, as we're still working with our chipset supplier on the offload part, so that won't be fully implemented, but the new Wi-Fi drivers are vastly much faster and should at least allow for decent speeds.

We've had more issues than we ever expected to have and we didn't do enough testing on the platform before we jumped from Realtek. At the same time, the hardware is a huge improvement, but the software is a big disappointment, even for us.
We've wasted a lot of time fixing platform issues instead of developing the product, but we're catching up on all of that now and by the end of the year we should have most things working at an acceptable level, including automation and notifications.

Keep in mind that although I'm admittedly working for the company, I'm in the same boat as you guys when it comes to features that aren't working and I'm as eager as you to get these features working. By now the software team aren't exactly my best friends, as I'm pushing them on almost a daily basis to get things done, be it fixing bugs or getting some new feature done quicker. I'm pushing on the behalf of you guys, as much as I do it on my own behalf, as I want this to be a good product that I'm happy with.

[activ]

Just a user opinion here, I am in no way afiliated to either Kickstarter or securify, but it seems to me that a lot of people have the wrong idea about what Kickstarter is.
The whole point of Kickstarter is that it is NOT a sales platform, you are not buying a product. On kickstarter you are funding a company or idea in the hopes that you will have some personal gain from this in the long run.
It is possible that this will get you a product that is usable, but it's just as possble that you don't get anything because the whole project fails. It's important to realise that Kickstarter is not a shop, it's a platform for VENTURE CAPITAL (only without monitary returns) and thus it's a risky way to spend money.

[LGNilsson]

I'd say that at least 60% of our backers would disagree with you, but yes, you're indeed correct about this.

That said, there are way too many campaigns that are either fraudulent or don't deliver at all. I've seen enough horror stories and we kind of got scammed into promoting a project, as we were supposed to integrate support for their hardware with the Almond+, but we haven't heard a thing from them since then. What I mean by this is that it's not just backers that take a risk on Kickstarter, as many companies are being approached by multiple other companies that are running campaigns for whatever it may be, to help them promote the other company's campaign in exchange for integration or what not. It doesn't always play out and we're not committing to anything like this now, because of one bad plum apple. That said, it looks like they'll still deliver their product at some point to their backers, but they're much, much later than we are at this point.

This stuff isn't as easy as it looks and yes, we have a product in the market already, but the Almond+ and Almond+ couldn't be much more different as far as routers goes and that doesn't take into consideration any of the home automation features.

There's nothing worse for me than seeing unhappy backers/customers, but I also understand that we can't please everyone. That said, if you have an issue, contact the support team and we'll do our very best to sort it out. The solution might not be perfect, as we're still a small company and we don't have the infrastructure in place to deal with some things. We found some production issues that has affected 2-3% of our backers and this is sadly something that happens when you make large quantities of a new product for the first time, but we've offered and will continue to offer replacements to anyone with problems. I do believe that from the next software release, a lot more people will be happy with the Wi-Fi performance. I think what you'll also find is that as a router manufacturer, we issue more firmware releases than any of our competitors, the Almond is about to get release 200, although, admittedly a lot of the early releases weren't for public consumptions, but I don't think you'll find any other router manufacturer that keeps adding features in the same way we've done over the lifetime of their products. As far as I'm concerned, we're only starting the real work on the Almond+ once the next firmware has been released, as that's when we'll start adding all the cool features.

[RGloverii]

The nice thing about the Almond+ is that the hardware feature set is easily extendable well into the future.

As long as the software continues to improve and iterate, the hardware should theoretically be able to keep up for years to come.

While I agree that the Almond+ wasn't nearly as fully baked as we had hoped when released, I have faith in the company to deliver on its promises, and expect the Almond+ to be useful in my environment for the foreseeable future.

That's just my two cents...