£69 is a huge amount to pay for this device.

I bought an energy monitor recently from theowl.com for £30 - this works in much the same way, but instead of broadcasting your usage to the web it shows it on a little box with a screen you can carry around the house with you. OK so you don't get a nice graph with statistics to compare against other households, but that's not something I'd be willing to pay an extra £40 to have over what I have now.

Some energy companies will also provide you one of these boxes (like mine, not the Alertme one) for free when you switch to one of their plans.

Only Google could find a way to get you to pay for the privilege of providing them with data revealing when you're at home (and to an extent what you're doing) - another superb way for them to profile their users!