Topic: Holy Cow! Ambient Weather has free shipping... but much higher prices

[WA4OPQ]

Ambient Weather's crazy shipping charges have been a sore spot for me for some time.
I just noticed that they are now offering free UPS shipping on all of their products.

But now the prices are crazy high. My favorite, the WS-1900 jumped from $71 to $106
And the 2902 U-bolts went from $1.99 to $10.49. The 2902 rain gauge funnel went from $2.99 to $11.49

I need to check the entire website to see if I can find a bargain that Ed missed.
And Ecowitt is looking better every day.

[MikeD8746]

Sounds like they rolled shipping into the cost of goods to make it seem like you're getting a bargain.  NOT!

[galfert]

The WS-2902A is at a great price I think at $129.99. It is still at $169 on Amazon.
The WS-2000 is also at a reasonable price of $212.99. It is $268.69 + $12.30 shipping on Amazon.

The WS-1900 at $71 before was not right when they still charged $75 for just the replacement WS-2902-ARRAY. But even with the new WS-1900 price it the WS-2902-ARRAY has gone up to $109.99 but you can still get the WS-1900 for less. How does that make sense?

The only way I can make sense of it is that it must be difficult to come up with a just pricing. Any Ambient branded station comes with the ability to upload to Ambientweather.net. That has a value and a maintenance cost for Ambient to run. So a new complete kit should cover that licensing cost. But a replacement part should not. But if they price the replacement parts at less then you can piece by piece assemble a complete station from parts and you'd circumvent the licensing cost that is support to come with a complete kit. This whole problem could be solved if they had a provision in the software for Ambient weather licensing that was not tied to the MAC address.

[WA4OPQ]

I agree that ambientweather.net has value.
But Ecowitt has their site, with similar functions, without the need for huge price hikes.