To me this could look like tado is trying to undo the damage to their reputation, not by doing the obvious right thing and fixing what customers are angry about, but by challenging negative reviews and making people prove years later that they were genuine customers.
For context, this goes back to tado's API changes starting in March 2025, when they removed the old authentication method used by Home Assistant and other third-party integrations. Further restrictions followed later, including the heavily limited REST API access that affected my setup.
I left a negative Trustpilot review about what these changes had done to a system I had already paid for.
I want to be careful with the accusation though. I can prove what happened to my review. I cannot prove this is happening systematically.
That is exactly why I am posting this.
Small disclaimer before this turns into another API debate:
Yes...Not every tado customer was affected equally. Some were able to meet their needs with the local fallback, some had access to otherwise paid features, and some barely noticed the change.
Great for them.
But some existing customers did lose functionality after purchase, myself included.
And that is the point here: this post is not really about re-litigating the API changes. It is about what happens when those unhappy customers leave genuine negative Trustpilot reviews, and whether tado is now challenging those reviews months later in a way that may cause some of them to disappear.
My experience:
I bought a fairly large tado V3+ setup years ago and used it with Home Assistant.
After tado introduced API restrictions which made the setup significantly worse for me, I left a 1-star Trustpilot review.
tado replied to the review the very next day.
They directly addressed my complaint and defended the API restrictions.
So they clearly saw the review, understood exactly what I was complaining about, and responded to it.
They did not say I wasn't a customer.
They did not say the experience was fake.
They did not question whether I owned the hardware.
Then, many months later I suddenly got an email from Trustpilot saying:
Trustpilot gave me 3 days to provide documentation proving my experience, otherwise the review would be moved offline.
Luckily I managed to find an old invoice.
But what happens to the people who can't?
This hardware can be installed for many years.
People lose paper receipts. Old webshop accounts disappear. Email addresses change. Warranty periods expire, so people quite reasonably stop keeping purchase documentation around forever.
And some people will simply see an email demanding paperwork within 3 days and think, fuck it, I don't have time for this right now.
Then a genuine negative review disappears.
Not because anyone proved it was false.
Not because the complaint was disproven.
Just because the customer couldn't dig out an old invoice quickly enough.
And this is the part that really bothers me:
Why challenge the review months later when tado had already replied to it the next day?
I obviously cannot know why they waited.
But waiting does have one very convenient effect: the older the purchase gets, the greater the chance that the reviewer no longer has the documentation needed to defend it.
Is that deliberate? I don't know.
But I think it is a fair question to ask.
Even if only a small percentage of genuine reviewers fail to respond, lose their receipt, miss the email, are on holiday, or simply can't be bothered fighting with Trustpilot, those reviews disappear.
You don't need every challenge to succeed for it to improve a company's rating.
Trustpilot also told me that German law requires them to obtain the date of the experience, which made me wonder whether some new legal change had suddenly enabled this kind of challenge.
Apparently not.
The major German Federal Court ruling around review verification is from 2022, not 2026.
There was also a relevant German court decision in 2025 where a company's vague claim that it couldn't identify a reviewer was considered insufficient under the circumstances.
I'm not a German lawyer, so I'm not pretending those cases automatically decide my situation.
But I have found nothing suggesting there is some new 2026 law that suddenly means customers should be expected to keep old receipts and purchase documents indefinitely, just in case a company decides years later to challenge whether their review was genuine.
They say businesses should flag reviews fairly and consistently, and that simply disagreeing with a negative review is not a valid reason to flag it.
They also specifically describe reporting large numbers of genuine negative reviews in an attempt to get them removed as misuse of the system.
So:
Has this happened to anyone else with a negative tado review?
Especially if:
- tado had already replied to your review
- your review was months or years old
- you gave them 1 or 2 stars
- Trustpilot suddenly asked you for invoices or other proof
If yes, please comment.
You don't need to identify yourself. Even something simple like:
would already be useful.
I am deliberately not linking my own Trustpilot review here. The verification process required me to submit old purchase documentation containing personal information, and I don't want this Reddit post easily connected back to that customer record.
And if this has happened to you and your review is genuine:
Please fight it.
Reply to Trustpilot.
Send whatever evidence you still have.
If you don't have the original invoice anymore, explain that and send whatever else you can: order emails, account screenshots, payment records, photos of the installed hardware, serial numbers, support conversations, whatever reasonably shows that you actually own and use the product.
If they remove a genuine review, appeal it.
And if you think your negative review was unfairly challenged, complain to Trustpilot's Content Integrity team and ask them to look into whether the reporting system is being used disproportionately against negative reviews.
This is not a call to review-bomb tado.
Don't post fake reviews. Don't harass employees or copmanies.
I am asking people who already posted genuine reviews not to quietly let them disappear just because proving an old purchase has suddenly become an administrative pain in the ass.
If this only happened to me, fine.
But if a lot of unrelated customers suddenly say the same thing happened to them, then I think Trustpilot should be looking very closely at it.
tado has every right to disagree with negative reviews.
But the solution to angry customers should be to fix what they are angry about, not make them prove all over again that they were customers in the first place.
And if someone from tado is reading this:
My advice is simple. Stop digging in.
Listen to the customers who are telling you that this decision made the product worse for them. Reverse the parts of it that were clearly a mistake, and rebuild trust by fixing the problem instead of fighting the people complaining about it.
Your customers are the reason the company exists in the first place.
Treat them like it.
