In regards to the recent discussion of Hopper Labs lack of business acumen, let’s not forget that all of their problems have not been under their control. There are certainly areas in which they could have done better. The biggest issue so far has been the
unauthorized switch of materials that their heater manufacturer made to save money, which caused a massive increase in failures. Hopper Labs eventually scrapped all of those parts, so I’m sure they lost a lot of money when that happened.
The next major issue was the constant delays and subsequent recall of the 2019 batch of batteries. This was their largest order ever,
50,000 batteries, and they also had to eventually scrap these batteries. They couldn’t sell batteries to their customer for months and then eventually had to write the entire batch off as a loss.
Now they have switched to a different battery supplier but Covid-19 is causing delays in production and shipping. Again, this is out of HL’s control. It was HL’s decision to use a custom battery, but the rest was out of their control.
When the Grasshopper first launched it had serious quality control issues. The repairs were much faster then. Almost all repairs were completed within three days. I personally have never had an RMA take longer than that, and with shipping my turnaround has always been under two weeks. The RMAs were prompt for several years until the heater fiasco. At that point Hopper Labs had to start producing heaters themselves at a much lower volume. They also were probably in dire financial circumstances making it hard to scale production as needed.
Before the heater fiasco the latest Grasshoppers had become pretty reliable and the customer service and RMAs were much quicker than the Firefly 2 for example. I fully believe Hopper Labs can return to that level and even surpass it. I’m not saying HL hasn’t made mistakes, I’m just saying we should give a little credit where it’s due. They’ve been working hard trying to make the best device possible. It’s easy to say they should have done things differently from the beginning but the device may have never reached the market. I’ve been using my Grasshoppers for over four years, the initial experience was amazing and my units have been upgraded throughout that time with better tech, free of charge.