re: 3 Hue Lights with bridge, $119 at Costco

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there is nothing you can say that would justify a $40 light bulb. you can get wifi bulbs that as extremely close to the intensity and color saturation as Hue bulbs. While the knock of brands are hit or miss, you can find them.

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i'm not necessarily a fan of the wifi bulbs but they are 1/3 the cost, they are newer, brighter and easy to set up and manage because you don't have to fool around with zigbee networking and a hub.

having said that, hue is the gold standard and there are tons of fun apps you can download and very robust support from apple, google and amazon. most of these wifi smart bulbs have questionable apps and support that could fold at any time meaning your bulbs could lose the ability to be smart. in theory zigbee is a local-control tech but hue implements it through their hub & cloud if you're wanting any type of voice control and even if you have an all local solution like hubitat or home assistant they can only access hue through their cloud api as well.

so in short, hue is great for what it is but without finding a fire sale its definitely overprice and there's a long lead time between bulb updates so better, brighter and cheaper smart bulbs can be found on amazon.