Disclaimer: I am wildly speculating as someone who has been been paying attention to smart home tech for a long time, but only minimally so because every time I checked it seemed too immature/janky/proprietary/etc. to bother dealing with. (It’s only recently, with the advent of stuff like Home Assistant, ESPHome, Tasmota, and hopefully-imminent Matter and Thread, that I’ve started to dip my toes in.)
First of all, I feel like a decade ago Z-Wave used to be the cheaper option. Second, my impression is that Z-wave, as an older standard with questionable compliance/implementation accuracy across vendors, just didn’t work quite as well as Zigbee, which I guess would make it less popular over time and therefore eventually more expensive due to fewer economies of scale.
Disclaimer: I am wildly speculating as someone who has been been paying attention to smart home tech for a long time, but only minimally so because every time I checked it seemed too immature/janky/proprietary/etc. to bother dealing with. (It’s only recently, with the advent of stuff like Home Assistant, ESPHome, Tasmota, and hopefully-imminent Matter and Thread, that I’ve started to dip my toes in.)
First of all, I feel like a decade ago Z-Wave used to be the cheaper option. Second, my impression is that Z-wave, as an older standard with questionable compliance/implementation accuracy across vendors, just didn’t work quite as well as Zigbee, which I guess would make it less popular over time and therefore eventually more expensive due to fewer economies of scale.