Should DIY cloud gadgets show when they depend on the cloud?

I’m building a small Raspberry Pi gadget with a hosted speech API, and I keep wondering whether the enclosure should admit when it needs the internet. The speech request goes to a remote service, so offline—or with bad credentials, billing, or permissions—the transcription feature simply fails. The rest of the gadget might still work, but that boundary is easy to hide behind one cheerful button.

I’m leaning toward a three-state LED: network available, cloud request active, and cloud function unavailable. A physical network-kill button would make offline behavior testable too. Hosted APIs are wonderfully convenient, but local control, repairability, and predictable failure modes feel more in the maker spirit; local inference is possible if the hardware supports it. Would you build this kind of indicator into your projects, or is it unnecessary complexity?

I’d separate “network exists” from “request succeeded.” A green LED can otherwise create false confidence while authentication, billing, or the provider is failing. I like the kill button mainly because it forces you to exercise the fallback path instead of discovering it during an outage.

The indicator is useful even without making a big privacy argument: it tells the operator what the device is doing right now. I’d prefer a physical switch that disables networking, with the LED showing the resulting offline state. That is clearer than burying the setting in software.

For a hobby build, I’d make speech degradation explicit: local commands continue, cloud transcription becomes unavailable. A supported accelerator can run some models locally, but that adds hardware and setup. The right answer may be a visible boundary between those two modes rather than pretending they are equivalent.

I’d start with the LED and skip the dedicated button unless testing is part of the project. Every extra control becomes another thing to document and eventually troubleshoot. Still, an unlabeled cloud dependency is worse than one small light.