5 Cheap Alternatives To Expensive Smart Home Gadgets

An Amazon Alexa speaker with a toy house model

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One of the most effective ways to integrate technology in your house is to start by adopting smart devices that are easy to set up. These typically include items such as smart light bulbs, speakers, blinds, smart plugs, and more. Slightly more complex smart gadgets, such as robot vacuums, cost more and might be a little complicated to set up, but they do offer immense value once configured.

There is no shortage of smart home device manufacturers — and as long as you’re picking one up from a reputable brand, you will not run into annoyances during and after setting them up. A good smart device will come with a responsive companion app, but will also let you connect to popular smart home frameworks like Google Home, Alexa, or Apple Home. The more features you have, the higher the price usually gets. You will also need to factor in the quality of the actual device — say, how bright a smart light can get, or how loud a smart speaker can play your favorite tunes.

It might feel compelling to buy smart devices from major OEMs like Apple or Google, but they are often premiumly priced. Thankfully, the market for smart home gadgets is quite vast, with several reliable manufacturers offering alternatives at comparatively affordable prices. Here are a couple of examples that offer great value and can transform your house into a smart home. You can find out more about our methodology at the end of this read.

Amazon Basics Smart Light Bulb

Installing smart light bulbs in any fixtures available in your home is a quick and easy way to add automation. You not only gain the ability to turn them on or off using your phone, but can also change their brightness and color temperature. When it comes to light bulbs, TP-Link is a popular pick, and its Tapo Smart Light Bulb is a fairly inexpensive purchase at $16 — but you can go lower. The Amazon Basics Smart Light Bulb costs $13 and offers nearly the same specifications and set of features as TP-Link’s option.

It’s a 60W equivalent light bulb and screws into an A19 socket. The light bulb connects to your home Wi-Fi network and doesn’t require any intermediary hubs. The setup process is straightforward — you simply screw the light bulb into a compatible socket and connect to it via the Alexa app on your smartphone. If you have an Alexa-enabled smart speaker, you can ditch your phone and control the light using voice commands.

The app lets you pick between 16 color presets — this unfortunately means you can’t select a specific hue. Another notable limitation of going with the Amazon Basics Smart Light Bulb is missing integration support with other smart home platforms like Google Home and Apple Home. Overall, the product has a 4.4-star rating, and customers mainly praise its quick setup process and affordability.

Blink Mini

Twitch, Eero, and IMDb are brands you may not know are owned by Amazon. Add Blink and Ring to the list — two smart home-centric brands that specialize in security cameras and video doorbells. The Blink Mini is a classic, and has amassed over 300,000 reviews with a product rating of 4.4 stars. Though there are updated models of the same, the original is still recommended by many due to its simple design and great value.

At $29, the Blink Mini undercuts the Ring Indoor Cam, which retails at $49 with a similar feature set. It’s designed to be used indoors and supports a respectable quality of 1080p, with infrared nighttime recording. You also get two-way audio with the Blink Mini, so you can hear and talk to anyone the camera sees while you’re away. It comes with motion detection, and you automatically get movement alerts via the smartphone app.

The Blink Mini earned a score of 3.5 out of 5 stars in TechRadar’s comprehensive review. Notable downsides include the lack of person detection, and the fact that you need to purchase an add-on module to be able to store local video recordings. This might be a dealbreaker to some buyers who need at least basic local recording support at no added price. Amazon hopes you pay for Blink subscription plans that let you store video clips to the cloud. Yet, most buyers are pleased with the Blink Mini’s recording quality and ease of setup.

Kasa Smart Plug Ultra Mini

Kasa is another one of TP-Link’s sub-brands that focuses mainly on Wi-Fi-enabled cameras, lights, and switches. Smart gadgets like light bulbs and thermostats do a lot, and that’s great — but most of us already have a populous selection of “dumb” appliances and gadgets that are perfectly functional, but just lack smart connectivity features.

The Kasa Smart Plug Ultra Mini is an affordable alternative to the Amazon Smart Plug that costs $25. At just $10 a pop, you can add wireless control to any appliance you own. Like its name suggests, the Kasa Smart Plug Ultra Mini has a considerably smaller form factor compared to other options. This makes it so it doesn’t block adjacent sockets.

The smart plug connects to your Wi-Fi network, and can be controlled via the Kasa app. As noted in ZDNet’s review, you can also control the smart plug via the Tapo app — in case you already have that installed to control other devices. It’s also supported by Google Home and Alexa, so you can use voice commands to control the thing.

Over at Amazon, the product has a 4.5-star rating amidst 17,000 reviews. Verified buyers praise its quick setup process and reliability. A notable omission, though, is the lack of Apple Home support. Regardless, with features like a timer and an Away Mode, the Kasa Smart Plug Ultra Mini is one of the most inexpensive smart home gadgets you can pick up.

Tapo Robot Vacuum and Mop

Deciding which smart features are worth the added expense is one of the things you should consider before buying a robot vacuum. In this case, the Tapo Robot Vacuum and Mop doesn’t come with a self-emptying base station, which can be an annoyance to a few buyers. This, however, is how TP-Link is able to mark the price of its vacuum robot down considerably. At $160, the RV20 Max Tapo Robot Vacuum and Mop is an affordable alternative to the Eufy 11S Max — a popular pick that’s priced at $280.

It has a 4.2-star rating amidst 1,500 reviews on Amazon. Customers are pleased with the kind of value the vacuum offers, with sparingly few complaints regarding its navigation accuracy. PCMag reviewed the Tapo Robot Vacuum and Mop in great detail, and praised its performance and features, but highlighted how it might not always clear stubborn debris.

The setup process is detailed in the quick start guide. The robot vacuum first maps your entire home with its LiDAR sensor. You can then tweak the final map it constructs and add any furniture labels. The robot vacuum also comes with a detachable mop pad, which can clean hardwood flooring. You control everything via the Tapo app, where you can create automated schedules for cleaning. You can also use the physical controls on the robot vacuum. The app allows you to configure options like the number of cleaning passes and vacuum power on a per-run basis.

Echo Dot

Decking out your home with smart devices is an exciting process, but once you have a collection that’s moderately big, controlling all of them becomes quite a hassle. This is why you should always look for Google Home or Apple Home support in any smart home gadget you’re eyeing. That way, you can control all your devices using a unified app. The next step in streamlining device control involves purchasing a smart speaker that can act as a centralized hub. For that, the $50 Echo Dot 5th Generation undercuts direct competitors like the Apple Homepod mini, which costscosts twice as much.

Choosing the right Amazon Echo device can get a bit confusing given the lineup’s expansive catalog, but the Echo Dot is a great entry-level pick. It packs in surprisingly loud speakers and comes with Alexa — which is how you can access all of its smart features. You have integration with most popular music streaming platforms like Spotify and Apple Music. The built-in microphone picks up audio really well, as highlighted in CNET’s review of the same, where the Echo Dot received a score of 8.3 out of 10.

If you have more than one Echo Dot in your home, you can pair them and enjoy multi-room music. Additionally, if you have one of Eero’s routers, the Echo Dot can act as a Wi-Fi repeater. The product is popular on Amazon, with a 4.7-star rating and close to 180,000 reviews.

How we selected products for this list

Onurdongel/Getty

Refreshing your home with affordable smart home gadgets is the quickest way to add convenience and automation to your daily routine. There are several smart home manufacturers you can choose from — and while it’s true that sticking with products from the same company will help create a seamless ecosystem, sometimes you just have to venture past the popular picks to find better deals.

All of the products we’ve listed have received overwhelmingly positive reviews by customers and professional reviewers. We evaluate feedback left by verified buyers on Amazon — these are consumers who have owned and used these gadgets extensively. For a more technical viewpoint, we’ve referred to reviews from reputable sources like CNET, TechRadar, and PCMag. These publications carry out in-depth testing of products before making a recommendation.

Other things to note before shopping for smart devices include compatibility checks and the Wi-Fi coverage in your home. Even if you’re shopping for different gadgets from different brands, look for Google Home, Apple Home, or Alexa support. This will significantly help with how you manage and control all of the smart devices you have set up.

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Stephan Dorsey

Stephan is the sports journalist for the Maple Grove Report.

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The Competitive Chaos Behind Moore’s Law

Semiconductors are everywhere. They power your phone, your car, your refrigerator. They enable AI models, cloud computing, and modern manufacturing. Advanced chips control weapons systems, telecommunications networks, and financial infrastructure. No technology is more central to modern economic activity.

This makes competition in semiconductor manufacturing a question of enormous importance. Yet the industry presents a puzzle that challenges conventional thinking about competition and market power.

Moore’s Law, the observation (then prediction) that chip performance doubles roughly every two years, has held steady for five decades.

Meanwhile, the industry has consolidated dramatically. By 2020, dozens of chip manufacturers from the 1980s had evolved into three leading players, with Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC) now producing most of the world’s advanced processors.

By standard antitrust metrics, the semiconductor industry appears problematic. Market concentration has risen steadily. The largest firms command dominant market shares. Entry barriers appear massive: a new fabrication facility costs more than $20 billion. These metrics suggest competition is weak or weakening, creating the conditions for stagnation.

But that’s not what’s happened. Instead, innovation thrived as the industry consolidated, maintaining the pace predicted by Moore’s Law (meaning, generally, more computing power at lower prices) even as the industry concentrated into fewer hands.

The question is—how can an industry be both highly concentrated and intensely competitive? How can fewer firms produce constant innovation? And what should this teach us about using standard measures of competition, as well as the appropriate focus of antitrust enforcement?

These are the questions David Teece, Geoffrey Manne, Mario Zúñiga, and I explore in a new paper on competition in semiconductor manufacturing. In this post, I want to augment that analysis, using the framework developed by two of this year’s Nobel Prize winners, Philippe Aghion and Peter Howitt. Their model of Schumpeterian creative destruction, which I wrote about recently, explains why the chip-manufacturing industry simultaneously exhibits both constant, relentless competition and high concentration.

Smooth Growth from Turbulent Churn

Before getting to the specifics of semiconductors, start with the macroeconomic patterns. Advanced economies show smooth, steady GDP growth; in the United States, this has meant roughly 2% annual growth for decades. The semiconductor industry has maintained similarly smooth exponential productivity improvements through Moore’s Law for five decades.

Yet underneath that smoothness, individual markets experience dramatic upheaval. How do we get steady macro-level growth from such turbulent micro dynamics?

Semiconductors present a similar puzzle. Transistors got smaller, chips got faster, and it all happened at a remarkably steady pace. If one were to plot chip performance over the years, you would see a smooth, predictable curve.

But in both the macroeconomy and the semiconductor industry, while the trend looks smooth, the firm-level picture is chaotic. In 2015, Intel led logic-chip manufacturing with its 14-nanometer process. Samsung and TSMC raced to catch up and, by 2017, they had matched Intel. Then TSMC pulled ahead with 7-nanometer in 2018. Intel stumbled on 10-nanometer for years. TSMC maintained its lead through 5-nanometer and 3-nanometer. Apple abandoned Intel processors entirely, switching to TSMC-manufactured chips. Intel’s market capitalization reflected this fall from grace.

This pattern of one firm innovating, others catching up, someone else pulling ahead, and yesterday’s leader falling behind repeats constantly. Netflix enters, and Blockbuster collapses. The iPhone launches and BlackBerry disappears. The semiconductor industry follows the same pattern of creative destruction: TSMC displaced Intel from the lead, and Intel is now investing billions to try to recapture its position.

Each transition reshuffles market leadership among firms. In semiconductors, each new process generation (about every two years) displaces the last, so it is a new opportunity for a new firm to take the lead. We have smooth aggregate growth built on creative destruction at the firm level. How does this actually work?

Serial Monopoly in Action

The Aghion-Howitt framework provides the answer: serial monopoly. Firms take turns being monopolists as each new leader displaces the last.

Success brings temporary monopoly profits. When TSMC got to 7-nanometer before Intel, it captured most of the market for advanced-logic chips. Those profits are substantial, with gross margins above 50% on leading-edge chip manufacturing.

These temporary monopoly profits are central to how innovation works in the semiconductor industry. Developing a new process node requires billions in upfront investment, with no guarantee of success. The possibility of capturing the market and earning substantial profits for a period of time is what justifies these massive bets. Without the prospect of temporarily high returns, no firm would make such risky investments. The monopoly profit is the carrot that motivates massive R&D investment.

But the monopoly remains temporary because rivals keep investing to displace the current leader. Even the current leader must invest billions to maintain its position. Despite leading advanced manufacturing, TSMC spent $6.4 billion on R&D in 2024. It cannot rest on its current position because it faces the same pressure to innovate as its challengers, knowing that any stumble means displacement. Intel, trying to regain its technological edge, spent $16.5 billion (31% of its revenue) on R&D. Samsung invests similar amounts.

If we zoom out beyond manufacturing to consider the broader industry, with better data, the semiconductor sector as a whole is one of the most R&D-intensive industries in the world. In 2024, overall U.S. semiconductor-industry investment in R&D totaled $62.7 billion, representing 18% of U.S. semiconductor firms’ revenue.

This is competition working, but it looks nothing like the textbook model. Firms in this industry don’t compete primarily by cutting prices on identical products to capture a bit more market share. They compete by racing to develop better products that make existing ones obsolete, capturing the market entirely. That is, at least, until the next innovation comes along. The competition happens through innovation, not just price.

This pattern creates what economists call “competition for the market,” rather than “competition in the market.” But it is competition nonetheless. Each new process node requires billions in research spending. These investments fund thousands of engineers working on photolithography, materials science, and manufacturing processes. The firm that gets to the next node first captures most of the market for that generation. Every competitor aims to displace it at the next node. For its part, TSMC knows that a single missed transition could reverse years of leadership.

Why Standard Competition Metrics Fail

Our paper examines how dynamic competition operates, which helps to explain why traditional antitrust metrics miss what’s actually happening.

The old structure-conduct-performance paradigm in antitrust assumes that market structure determines competitive behavior and, ultimately, market performance. Under this view, concentrated markets with few firms should produce higher prices, lower output, and reduced innovation because firms face less competitive pressure. When regulators see three firms controlling advanced semiconductor manufacturing, the paradigm suggests these firms can coordinate behavior, raise prices, and avoid the costly investments that competition would otherwise force.

While economists abandoned the strong form of this paradigm decades ago, modern antitrust analysis still relies heavily on structural metrics: how many firms, what market shares, what concentration ratios. These metrics would assume that the semiconductor industry is problematic. Three firms controlling advanced manufacturing looks like an oligopoly that should be earning excessive profits and underinvesting in R&D.

But inferring weak competition and poor performance from this structure misreads the competitive dynamics, especially in semiconductor manufacturing. Indeed, the semiconductor-manufacturing industry’s consolidated structure emerged from competition, not in spite of it. Competition led to consolidation around a few highly capable firms. In fact, that’s a standard result across many industries: competition increases concentration.

This mechanism is consistent with the Aghion-Howitt framework. Developing advanced manufacturing processes requires massive fixed costs. While a new fabrication facility costs $20 billion or more, chips sell for around $50 to a few thousand dollars each, depending on their complexity. Only firms that can spread those costs across enormous production volumes can recoup the investment. And the efficient scale has grown over time as the technology required to keep pace with Moore’s Law has become increasingly difficult.

This creates natural pressure toward concentration. But concentration doesn’t eliminate competitive pressure. Where there is a whole market’s worth of profits at stake, competition is fierce, and the competitive pressure of displacement provides the discipline that keeps firms investing and innovating.

The Intel case illustrates this process. Intel dominated logic-chip manufacturing for decades, but leadership did not mean complacency. Intel invested heavily in its 10-nanometer process, spending billions on new fabrication facilities and engineering talent. The company’s problem was not lack of effort. Instead, Intel’s engineers encountered unexpected manufacturing difficulties with the new process. Yields remained low, meaning too few working chips per wafer to make production economical. Intel delayed commercial production repeatedly while trying to solve these problems.

Meanwhile, TSMC succeeded with its competing 7-nanometer process. TSMC’s engineers took different technical approaches that proved more manufacturable. When Apple needed chips for its new Mac computers, it chose TSMC’s superior process over Intel’s delayed one. AMD, which had previously used Intel-equivalent processes, switched to TSMC and gained market share with chips that outperformed Intel’s offerings.

The displacement happened through innovation, not price cuts. Customers didn’t switch because TSMC charged less (although that mattered too). They switched because TSMC’s more advanced manufacturing process enabled better chips: faster, more power-efficient, with more features per unit area. Intel’s stumble demonstrates that no firm’s position is secure. But TSMC faces the same pressure today. If TSMC fails to deliver on 2-nanometer or the generations beyond, Samsung or Intel will capture those customers.

This is Joseph Schumpeter’s “creative destruction” in action.

Market structure is endogenous. The remaining firms and sizes are the outcome of competitive processes, not the point from which competition starts. TSMC became a big player by out-innovating Intel in a specific technological transition.

As we point out in the paper, the regional history of the industry confirms this pattern. In the 1980s, U.S.-based firms dominated semiconductor manufacturing. Japanese manufacturers invested heavily in process technology and quality control. They achieved higher yields (more working chips per silicon wafer) than their American competitors. By the late 1980s, most American memory-chip firms had exited the market.

From the traditional structure-conduct-performance perspective, this looks like a competition failure. U.S. firms lost. The market is concentrated. But innovation accelerated. Japanese firms competed with one other to improve manufacturing processes. Then, Korean firms entered with even more aggressive investments. Samsung displaced Japanese leaders through superior manufacturing technology.

What This Means for Policy

The semiconductor industry illustrates why we need to think differently about competition in innovative industries. Standard antitrust metrics—concentration ratios, market shares, price-cost margins—can mislead enforcers about competitive conditions in industries characterized by rapid innovation and large fixed costs. These metrics assume that market structure determines competitive intensity. But in Schumpeterian industries, especially, intense competition produces concentrated structures as successful innovators capture the market, only to face displacement at the next technological transition.

When it comes to policy, antitrust authorities must understand this reality about market competition. They must ask whether the conditions for ongoing creative destruction remain intact:

Do incumbent firms face credible threats from potential innovators?
Are firms investing in next-generation technology?
Can new entrants or existing rivals displace leaders who stop innovating?
Does the market reward innovation with temporary profits that fund further investment?

For semiconductors, the answers suggest competition is working well, despite high concentration. Firms invest enormous sums in R&D. New process nodes arrive regularly. Leadership positions remain contestable. Intel’s stumbles show no firm’s leadership is permanent.

Enforcement actions that make sense in static markets will completely backfire in Schumpeterian ones. Breaking up a leading firm might destroy the scale economies needed for the massive investments that generate that innovation. Punishing profits will eliminate the incentive for risky R&D bets. The more productive approach examines whether specific practices impede the competition in innovation that disciplines incumbents, not whether a particular market structure looks too concentrated.

The semiconductor industry has maintained Moore’s Law for five decades while consolidating from dozens of manufacturers to three leading players. Concentration did not produce stagnation. Rather, it produced continuous technological progress and regular leadership transitions as firms displaced each other through innovation.

The post The Competitive Chaos Behind Moore’s Law appeared first on Truth on the Market.

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