About five years ago the exhaust fan on my furnace started making noise. It sounded like a bearing issue, so I figured out the correct replacement part, ordered it and installed it myself.
It cost a little under $200 all told. I know that the service call would have been at least $500.
So many of the things we own are made of generic parts that you can buy off of amazon for less than the cost of getting a guy to come look at it.
I interviewed a bunch of years ago with a company called “xmode social” (I was in desperate need of a job. I fortunately did not get that one.) They had a framework that they paid app publishers in to include in their apps. That framework collected your location data and sent it to xmode who sold that data. That was their entire business AFAIK.
There don’t need to be any shared features for companies to include shit like that in their apps. They just need a way to make the line go up.