Commercialisation of a WiFi plug-in on the ESP8266 - what features would be of interest?

I like this line best: "Your WIFIPLUG will always be synced with your private account in our Amazon Secured Home Cloud.
GUARANTEED to be online until 2020"

This means that de facto control of your sockets, will be in Amazon's hands, and after 2020, it may shut down this service, which will severely e.g. reduce the functionality of these sockets (or stop working altogether?).
Or it may also demand some kind of additional (subscription?) fee for the continued use of the aforementioned service, etc....

Jado_one wrote:

I wonder if, for example, the beginnings of device spoilage manifesting itself as an increase in device power consumption above standard values could be detected in this way. With constant monitoring you could probably catch something like that (but it probably happens once per....).

https://internetrzeczywpraktyce.blogspot.com/2016/01/oszczedzanie-pradu-w-firmie.html

In telecommunications, I am familiar with OSS solutions: Operation Support Systems. You connect probes to various places in the telecommunications network, make a map of the devices, map it to the probes and you can see where you need to optimise - trends on the server (e.g. increase in demand for CPU or memory): there is also a place for this here; this answers the question of whether you can detect the beginnings of a device breaking down: yes you can, you can also predict that the consumption of something there is increasing and in a month it will exceed a critical value

To be honest, I'm not thrilled with cloud technology
I would rather prefer Fog Computing - i.e. what doesn't require a connection to a remote server we operate locally, and only those services that require internet access (as this is required for them to make sense) we take outside.

Manufacturers will release devices with "IoT Only" in some time - and you won't be able to buy others, then there will be no way out.
But for now

However, you have to be prepared for extra charges for IoT-related services - because that is, after all, what manufacturers are after.

The electronics engineer, fortunately, can make many of the devices himself, working to his own rules
Which I encourage you to do.

In my opinion, an accurate measurement of the power consumption of the WiFi plug is not necessary. However, it should be borne in mind that devices with their own switch will be connected to it. So it may be useful to know 0/1 whether any current flows when the relay contact is shorted. It will probably often happen that someone will connect that proverbial heater but its switch will be in the OFF position. The user may find that the remote control has broken down.

TvWidget wrote:

In my opinion, an accurate measurement of the power consumption of the WiFi plug is not necessary. However, bear in mind that you will be connecting devices with their own switch. So it may be useful to know 0/1 whether any current flows when the relay contact is shorted. It will probably often happen that someone will connect that proverbial heater but its switch will be in the OFF position. The user may find that the remote control has broken down.

very good idea

Jado_one wrote:

Makers will release devices with "IoT Only" in some time - and there will be no way to buy others, then there will be no way out.

And this is where Fellow's product @lukaszrzepinski - more expensive, probably niche, but providing privacy.