We’ve been through this discussion many times before, but here goes…
If you don’t like the idea of using our servers, buy a plain wifi module - there are plenty available that can post to arbitrary servers on the internet - and do it yourself. We concentrate on providing a solution for what we believe are the problems that most device vendors face when making connected products. That means we will never provide a wifi module that doesn’t use our service, because we are a platform company that happens to provide hardware, not a hardware platform that happens to want to sell you a cloud service on the side. The imp003 module, which is neither made not sold by ourselves is a pretty clear example of this.
We’re very well funded, and have shipped almost half a million imps - the overwhelming majority of which are in commercial products and hence are with paid service. There are a lot of people relying on us staying around. I know “others trust us, you should too” is not necessarily reassuring to everyone, but having paying customers is a good thing and a sign that our business model is viable.
As for enterprise servers that you operate yourself (with client access licenses much like other enterprise software products) - yes, absolutely possible in the future, and essential for certain categories of application, and ditto for other options for continuity of service.
On the service: we have a great team, and we’re working very hard on this; do bear in mind that the free developer service is not the same service that commercial devices use and does have more outages/issues - for example, all developer devices are using our new Erlang connection server, and wringing out the bugs there has caused some issues over the last few weeks. We have had service-wide issues from time to time, and each one has resulted in service improvements as hidden issues are found and addressed. We’re also improving our communication on issues with externally hosted status pages and automatic notifications in the coming months.
Glad you like the product, we’re enjoying building it 