That's fair and we've put some work into mitigating that risk. Our core runtime is open source, as are most of the apps for the Tidbyt.
We've also released hardware spec that folks have used to start writing their own open firmwares, which don't need to reach out to our servers or the Internet at all. That's something I'd like to contribute to and support more of (though with a tiny company, our resources are limited).
That's actually sounds way better than I expected. I went from "I want it" to "that's a potentially very expensive brick" very fast. Although it's weird that pushing image to a device on the same network has to go through your servers.
We've also released hardware spec that folks have used to start writing their own open firmwares, which don't need to reach out to our servers or the Internet at all. That's something I'd like to contribute to and support more of (though with a tiny company, our resources are limited).