Pay your respects at the smart-home graveyard

The smart home category has plenty of success stories like the Amazon Echo and the Nest Learning Thermostat, but that doesn't mean all of our favorites made the cut. 

Plenty of smart home products that we liked or were excited about have been discontinued. Either the companies that made them moved on or went out of business. We're not counting products that have simply been upgraded.

Here are the ones that got away. Here is the smart home's graveyard. 

A cool-looking gadget that never quite came to be, the Arist Cafe offered high-end coffee you could customize from an app. Arist could make espresso as well as coffee, and you could control the water temperature, grind size, brewing pressure and more with the app to please your inner barista. 

Smart leak detection is a useful feature, and a number of devices pull it off well. The Delta Leak Detector showed promise with a nice design, simple setup and feature-rich app, but it was ultimately too expensive and didn't integrate with enough other smart-home gear. 

Delta pulled it from the market in July 2018 and stopped supporting the app. 

What was supposed to be the perfect smart garden assistant, the Edyn Garden Sensor instead had a shallow and slow app. The Edyn Sensor certainly looked beautiful, but it did too little for what it cost. 

Now it and a number of other plant sensors are nowhere to be found. 

Goji's smart lock combined the functionality of an automated deadbolt such as the one from August with a built-in cam that could function as a smart doorbell like the model from Ring.

The concept was pretty cool, and Goji's 2013 crowd-funding campaign came on the early side of the smart lock category as a whole. Alas, it never came to fruition, and the startup behind the device never shipped the Goji Smart Lock. 

Halo+ made it to production. In fact, we were able to review the retail version of the smart smoke alarm and gave it positive marks. The $130 gadget sensed smoke and carbon monoxide, as you'd expect, and sent you a push alert when it smelled something amiss.

Halo's Alarm also had unique weather awareness, so it could warn you of incoming inclement weather. I expected the feature to be annoying, but it was customizable enough to be helpful, especially if you like turning your phone off at night. 

Ultimately, the startup Halo Smart Labs didn't have the resources to continue making and supporting the product, so the company closed its doors. If you own a Halo, you can still keep it functioning if you connect it to a compatible smart-home hub. 

Admittedly, we were never very excited about the Juicero. It cost a bundle and made you shell out even more for an exorbitant subscription to proprietary packs of fruit and vegetables. The cold-press organic juicer did garner a lot of hype, however. 

Given its price and limited functionality, the demise of the Juicero makes sense, and the company shut down in the fall of 2017. 

Korner offered a reliable home-security setup at a relatively affordable price. We liked the system, but it was pretty simple and required you to pay a yearly fee starting starting in your second year. 

The company announced it was shutting down in June of 2018, with its servers closing a month after that. Korner's cleverly designed door sensors are now just door decorations. 

Lighthouse hit the market briefly in 2018. The startup behind the cam looked to be on the verge of truly making smart cams smarter. Lighthouse could recognize faces and distinguish people from pets, but its app was a true standout.

You could find footage and set up alerts simply by talking to the app, and it understood a wide variety of intuitive commands. You could simply say "let me know when the kids get home" or "let me know if the kids aren't home by 5" and Lighthouse would use the cams' geofencing and face recognition to set up those precise alerts. 

You could also find footage by voice or type in the same intuitive commands. The cam even had a 3D time-of-flight sensor similar to what you'd find in a self-driving car to sense actions like running. 

While cool in concept, Lighthouse still struggled to learn faces in practice and apparently it struggled to catch on with the public. The startup announced it was ending all operations late in 2018, and it fully shut down early this year.

Kuri charmed me when I met the adorable household robot at CES in 2017. You could give voice commands to Kuri and it would respond with adorable chirps and expressive eyes. It also had cameras behind those eyes and wheels at its base so it could roam your home while you were away looking for anything out of place.

Unfortunately, Kuri was never meant to be. Startup Mayfield Robotics had to cease production last summer and cancelled all preorders after it was unable to scale up to retail. 

Speaking of lost plant sensors, the Parrot Flower Power was another popular one that you can no longer find on the market today. 

PlantLink was one of my favorites from the first group of smart plant sensors. It survived a little longer than the rest, as gardening giant Scott's acquired it from startup Oso Technologies and added PlantLink to its Gro line of smart garden products.

Even that wasn't enough to save it in the long run. Scott's stopped supporting and selling PlantLink late in 2018. 

If this is the first time you've seen this adorable, smart piggy bank, take a deep breath, you can actually still find it online. We were surprisingly fond of the Porkfolio in our review, but the company that made it -- Quirky -- won't be coming up with creative projects like the Porkfolio or the Egg Minder any longer. 

Quirky filed for bankruptcy in 2015 and sold off its Wink smart-home platform. 

One of the first smart-home hubs on the market became an expensive brick after the Alphabet-owned Nest Labs acquired Revolv, then shut it down. 

The device allowed you to connect and control multiple smart-home gadgets at once, a feature now made relatively common by other hubs like the Samsung SmartThings hub, but at the time, the Revolv was pretty unique.

Nest Labs turned off the hub's functionality in 2016, forcing customers who bought it to look for another option. 

Another popular Kickstarter project, the Sansaire Delta never made it into the hands of backers, which was all the more surprising as Sansaire had already successfully made another immersion circulator.

Like other circulators, the Delta attached to most pots of water and maintained a consistent hot temp so you could cook using the Sansaire Sous Vide style. Seal your food, put it in the hot bath, and let it sit for awhile for perfectly cooked and tender meats, veggies or whatever you'd like. 

The startup Sansaire shut down operations in February of 2018 after issues with the manufacturer. It's still offering some support for existing Sansaire units, but it issued refunds to those who ordered the Delta. 

While the Teforia Infuser looks like a luxury device you might like to have on your counter, we never thought paying $1,500 for a robotic tea maker sounded like a great idea. Even in practice, the Teforia Infuser couldn't win us over. The tea was good, but not worth $1,500.

The company closed down in the fall of 2017, so you no longer have to wonder if there's something you're missing from a $1,500 tea maker.