It's just lack of competitive pressure. I bet if you investigate you will find there are only a couple of suppliers that have the bowling alley market sewn up between them.

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nativeit 14 hours ago | parent | next [-]

You’d die on the back of unreliable operation and relatively high maintenance. A DIY system built off of cheap ESP32s is never going to be reliable enough. The system as described above is the sort of thing I would happily operate for myself, but would never attempt to sell as a product. Anyone who’s tried to hold together a few dozen ESP32-powered IoT devices will likely attest—they’re very impressive for their cost, but hardly reliable on the scale of years.

	▲	Scoundreller 11 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> but hardly reliable on the scale of years. I’ve had similar experiences with “enterprise”-grade hardware. But sometimes the “price” isn’t just the hardware, but also having someone on-call 24/7 to support and possibly fly-out to investigate within X hours.

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kfse 18 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Work out how many bowling alleys there are and how many of them are in the market for an upgrade or a fresh install, trying to get to be the king of that hill is a lot of work and risk for not really life changing rewards compared with what a self-avowed SRE could make just pulling paychecks

	▲	qdotme 17 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Well, the reality of those types of businesses is that once set they do become a relatively low maintenance (and for some, very low 'urgent' maintenance) passive income. It's really easy to pull $300k/y as an SRE (but that does amount to about $100/hr equivalent in SMB, assuming realistic >40h workweeks and the tax advantages in SMB, even less if you have to pay for services you enjoy and can't find time for due to FTE - nannies or even changing your own oil). It is extremely hard to keep that $100/hr and a sliding scale - one week you work 50h, the other 30h, then you take a month or three off at $5h/week. Mine (and I don't regret these) is running midsize PV plants. Slightly bigger than residential (hey, does OP want solar PV on the rooftop? I have a bowling alley as a client, they are a great match), but again not large enough to attract a scaled business. I approximately put in 5h on each a year after the initial setup (around 100hr each), for $10k/y in profit from each.

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ozim 14 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

There is not much to compete for. Competitive pressure doesn’t magically spawn out of thin air.