Dec 12, 2025 12:01 PM

This Group Pays Bounties to Repair Broken Devices—Even If the Fix Breaks the Law

Fulu sets repair bounties on consumer products that employ sneaky features that limit user control. Just this week, it awarded more than $10,000 to the person who hacked the Molekule air purifier.

Photograph: DragonImages/ Getty Images

Companies tend to be rather picky about who gets to poke around inside their products. Manufacturers sometimes even take steps that prevent consumers from repairing their device when it breaks, or modifying it with third-party products.

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Comments (14)

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LONEARRANGER
VTBOARDER
TMI
Vtboarder, just to let you know, smoke (and monoxide) detectors are NOT comparable here. A cheap ionization detector attracts dust to a radioactive spot in a shielded chamber. There's no way to clean that without the risk of releasing that material, do it really does need to be entirely replaced. Similarly, the sensor in a CO detector physically decays and must be replaced. So those are not "locked" items, they truly are "consumed" and must be replaced. Oddly enough, that entire industry has only recently been mentioning this. For 40 years they just said "buy batteries every year" and didn't bother telling us that old detectors were worthless.
LANKICAT
EVENTUALCONTENDER
You’re thinking of Keurig, I think. Plenty of places sell off-brand Nespresso compatible pods.
PEACE

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Boone Ashworth is a staff writer on the WIRED Gear desk, where he writes about connected hardware, sustainability, and the right to repair. He graduated from San Francisco State University and still lives in the city. He is currently training to be a virtual reality DJ. ... Read More

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