Before you buy
TOMMY Zero is closed source and needs an internet connection to check your license. Why it works this way, and what we do to keep both risks small.
TOMMY Zero is closed source, and it needs an internet connection to check your license. For a company building privacy-focused Wi-Fi sensing, those are the two biggest weaknesses of this product.
Closed source means you can't read the code, so you can't see for yourself that your sensing data stays on your network, and the online license check means that if TOMMY shut down and our servers went away, the software you paid for would stop working.
We limit both risks in a few ways, described below, but you may still find them to be a dealbreaker. If so, TOMMY Zero may not be for you, and our upcoming TOMMY One may be a better fit.
Why it works this way
We are bootstrapped with no VC funding and work on TOMMY full time to make it a polished product we are proud of and want to use in our own homes. License sales are the only thing keeping us afloat.
The problem is that TOMMY Zero is software only. You bring the ESP32 boards and the computer it runs on, so the software is the only thing we can charge for. If the code were open, anyone could remove the license check, and we have not found another way to fund full-time work.
An offline license check would be ideal, but since TOMMY Zero runs as a Home Assistant App or a Docker container, identifying the machine underneath to bind the license is hard and fragile.
How we keep the risks small
Many people choose TOMMY Zero anyway, and we owe it to them to keep both risks small.
If TOMMY shuts down
We release offline activation for every purchased license, so your setup keeps working without our servers.
You can check every connection
Closed source code does not hide network traffic. Every connection TOMMY Zero makes to the internet can be captured and inspected like any other traffic on your network. For a motivated person, that takes about half an hour to set up, and there is no way for us to hide a connection from it.
Most people won't bother, so we pay €250 to the first person who finds a connection in a release that our privacy policy does not document. If someone does, we fix it and publish the report. The program has run since June 2026, and no one has found one.
Fully offline with TOMMY One
TOMMY One is a sensor we are developing, coming in 2027. Because we provision each device, the license is stored on it, so everything runs locally without an internet connection. Explore TOMMY One
Questions
If you have any questions or concerns, you are welcome to join our Discord and ask us directly.