This isn’t going to stop happening unless governments finally get involved to do their most basic job: protect their citizens. This habit among digital and tech companies of selling a thing only to claw back some of the function of that thing after the purchase is both rampant and, frankly, getting ridiculous. It’s bad enough when a company goes fully kablooey, has to shut down all their backend servers and gear, and renders their products useless. That sucks, there are ways around it, and it shouldn’t be allowed, but it’s quite different than perfectly healthy companies selling a product that has features and capabilities out of the box, only to claw back those capabilities and either shut them down or stick them behind some subscription paywall.

And that latter of those examples is what is happening again, this time from Futurehome, which makes a series of smarthome IoT products.

Launched in 2016, Futurehome’s Smarthub is marketed as a central hub for controlling Internet-connected devices in smart homes. For years, the Norwegian company sold its products, which also include smart thermostats, smart lighting, and smart fire and carbon monoxide alarms, for a one-time fee that included access to its companion app and cloud platform for control and automation. As of June 26, though, those core features require a 1,188 NOK (about $116.56) annual subscription fee, turning the smart home devices into dumb ones if users don’t pay up.

“You lose access to controlling devices, configuring; automations, modes, shortcuts, and energy services,” a company FAQ page says.

You also can’t get support from Futurehome without a subscription. “Most” paid features are inaccessible without a subscription, too, the FAQ from Futurehome, which claims to be in 38,000 households, says.

That would be potentially nearly a decade of a bought product working one way, only to have its core functionality tucked behind a subscription paywall on the whim of the company. This is one of those situations that, and I don’t care what country you live in, should elicit the common sense reaction of: this shouldn’t be fucking legal. But, due to the apathy of government and the steady erosion of anything remotely representing true consumer protection, this sort of thing is happening more and more frequently.

And it’s not as though all of this functionality requires support from backend company assets, either. Some do, sure, but some of the features that suddenly don’t work appear to have nothing to do with centralized corporate servers or services.

In response, a Reddit user, according to a Reddit-provided translation of the Norwegian post, said:

I can understand to some extent that they have to do it for services that have ongoing expenses, like servers (even though I actually think it’s their problem, not mine, that they didn’t realize this was a bad idea when they sold me the solution), but a local function that only works internally in the equipment I’ve already paid for shouldn’t be blocked behind a paywall.

So what’s the explanation here? Simple: money! Futurehome recently went through bankruptcy and is blaming that situation for why it needs to suddenly create a cash percolator among the customers that already bought its products with the expectations of the functionality with which they were sold. As always, the company has insisted the subscription fees will allow it to remain solvent and, as the evergreen promise goes, “fund product development, and provide high-quality support.” We’ve seen this movie before and we know how it ends.

As you’d expect, some people are attempting to figure out how to make Futurehome products work without the subscription. Perhaps as a result of that, Futurehome shut down its own user forum in June. In addition, the CEO is complaining about how the company now has to invest time and resources to fight its own customers’ attempts to make the products they bought work like they did at the time of purchase.

Futurehome has fought efforts to crack its firmware, with CEO Øyvind Fries telling Norwegian consumer tech website Tek.no, per a Google translation, “It is regrettable that we now have to spend time and resources strengthening the security of a popular service rather than further developing functionality for the benefit of our customers.”

But is it as regrettable as your own customers suddenly finding out the thing they bought won’t work anymore because your company didn’t business well enough?

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