Absolutely true. MQTT exists, as does CoAP and AMQP. There&#x27;s also simple JSON blobs that can be emitted under an API. None of these things are hard...<p>... But they do free you from the company. And these days, ball-and-chaining you to their servers is the big &quot;In&quot; thing to do.<p>Now for me, I&#x27;m a big fan of Node-Red. It&#x27;s best described as a IFTTT for your machine&#x2F;network. Runs locally, and just works. I also use PageNodes, a client-only modification of Node-Red. You can use it here:<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;ipfs.io&#x2F;ipfs&#x2F;QmSCrZUPkqH4gsncsD7tGXPiFpymsbwmywsHXLDhBtSQ6T&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;ipfs.io&#x2F;ipfs&#x2F;QmSCrZUPkqH4gsncsD7tGXPiFpymsbwmywsHXLDh...</a><p>(It&#x27;s an IPFS link, and is on the permanent web. That link will always work as long as machines are hosting it.)<p>EDIT: Really? Multiple -1&#x27;s for a valid criticism of &quot;companies want you locked in to their network&quot;? We just got done with Google killing off a whole platform because of extensive tie-in to &#x27;cloud servers&#x27;. I&#x27;m just giving a converse answer how to approach the problem.