The site shows $970 for me in the US, but the monthly fee is shown as £29.99/m.

Sorry, I have 13 days to buy it with the app being free, it's $970, forget about shipping and duty. But even if it ends up being 1300, what I said still applies.

Ira

And from what you describe about your roasting needs, which are consistent with what I said about the 100g Home's target market, you probably don't need the editing capabilities anyway (but it's such a good deal I'd pull the trigger now if you can.)

IMHO the majority of HB members who actively discuss roasting are prepared to dive headlong into learning a deep and rather complex subject that requires serious practitioners to have some ability in science, analysis, engineering, creativity and art. Some succeed (the "artisans") and some end up frustrated, perhaps due to inadequate equipment, lack of skill, lack of time, lack of motivation, etc.

I believe there are many people here and out in the world who would love to roast their own coffee, but simply don't want to get into all the minutia or don't have the abilities to do so. Some might be willing and able to experiment with various pourover techniques or even go toe-to-toe with a semi-automatic espresso machine (even a lever), and we all know it can take years to learn how to pull a good shot. But roasting is vastly more difficult to master. There's only so much time in the day, only so much money in the bank.

I think the idea of a home roasting machine that can consistently produce 100g batches, virtually unattended, in just a few minutes, with no more trouble than dumping in the greens, selecting a profile designed for those greens, the roast degree and maybe DT, pushing a button and collecting the cooled beans at the end is nothing short of brilliant, and will be well worth $1,000 to many serious coffee lovers. They will neither need nor want the editing capabilities, which is probably why Ikawa has priced them so high.

Personally, I'm in the middle. I've done many roasts on my Quest M3, some successful, some not, but I concluded that don't have the time or inclination to become an accomplished creator of roast profiles or to hover over a roaster adjusting a bunch of variables to pull all the flavors I want out of new green (not to mention avoiding crashes and flicks.) And then if I get it right, hovering over the roaster to make sure I adjust everything exactly the same way for the next batch. But I do want the option to fully edit existing profiles to suit my tastes for the coffee I'm roasting, and being finicky I want the more precise and accurate control offered by monitoring exhaust temperature. I like to experiment with different SOs and how different roast profiles affect them, and I like to have several different roasted SOs on hand. That, together with drinking singles almost exclusively, makes a smaller batch size preferable. That why I went with the Pro V3. I've only done 50 roasts, but so far I'm deeply in love. And all I've done is slightly shorten an existing espresso profile and drop the roast early, depending on how much DT and roast degree I want. Really nothing more than the 100g Home will allow without the subscription. I'll have to do more adjustment as I branch out to a wider field of SOs, but it's amazing to me how many coffees work with one slightly tweaked profile.

And you're right that I'd probably never use it, but I'd hate to not have it and then discover it's $40/month for something I want to use. Seems like it will allow the 100 home to do as much as the V3 Pro, but maybe with fewer sensors making it harder to understand. As it is if I don't buy it before the free cutoff, I could instead of subscribing, just save that money and buy their new machine in 2 years and come out about the same. It's as if it's priced to insure people don't subscribe. I wonder where the most income is on the curve of free to the current cost. There is certainly a monthly price I'd pay even if I barely used it, but at the current price, I doubt if it wasn't free I'd ever be willing to even try. And it's not that I can't afford it, it just seems unreasonable. If they want to make their money off a subscription, than make the hardware inexpensive. It's like they are pricing for it business, not the home market.

Ira

Ira, that's actually a pretty cool business model and I can understand why it's attractive. It's painless and push-button home roasting - I can get behind that.

I think we have different approaches to roasting. You want something that will be easy and reliably produce great coffee. I want to spend hours tinkering with minor details in curves.

I'm honestly just disappointed because they finally released a product I could imagine myself purchasing - but then they adjusted their business model to be completely absurd. It's not like its $5 a month - it's 30 british pounds per month! That's INSANE I can buy 6 pounds of fantastic green coffee for that much money.

FWIW, Ikawa and Panasonic have been using the monthly subscription green business model in Japan since 2017.

Here's an English-language write-up: https://news.panasonic.com/global/stori ... 87459.html

Actual Panasonic site in Japanese (Google translate seems to do a pretty good job)
https://panasonic.jp/roast/

I bet the monthly fee is part of a subscription service they haven't finalized yet that includes green coffee, so it remains unannounced and weird to those who are reading lawyer driven footnotes. Thats really the only rational explanation for such a high monthly fee.

I am really interested in this product. If I end up pulling the trigger, will share my experiences.

TigerStripes wrote:Ira, that's actually a pretty cool business model and I can understand why it's attractive. It's painless and push-button home roasting - I can get behind that.

I really spent a number of years trying, I have what is probably the worlds most automated Behmor, Bluetooth connected and completely controlled from my computer using software I wrote. When COVID started my time became better spent replacing all the employees I wouldn't allow in my house so I started buying 5lb bags from good roasters and freezing them, but I miss roasting because of the occasional wonders shown in the coffee I roasted. This should allow the experimentation yet always give me a decent starting point.

Ira

Also thinking to purchase.

Subscription puts me off. Can see them reversing this decision. Is it sustainable long term to restrict features for 29.99 a month. And now your faces with a decision to buy not even knowing what the features are or what you get for 29.99 a month

Also 970$ price in US is a lot cheaper than 970£ which makes me wonder. I know you have to pay customs or VAT but Ikawa don't get that money so how can they sell it for 970$

In Advanced Editing, you can edit roast recipes with up to 6 roast inlet temperature points, 3 airflow points across 12 minutes and customise bean cooling for up to 3 minutes. It's available as a subscription at £29.99 (facilitated via the iTunes store) or free for users with app accounts created before the 1st of November 2021, when these controls were the primary mode of our Roasting System.

If I am not wrong you can install the app and create account without an Ikawa machine.
So as long as you do this now, you probably won't have to pay the subscription fee.