Yeah, they're in the same space as us. We hope that our range, low price, and extreme flexibility will really win people over. Wifi is not really a good protocol for Arduino. If you just want to send a few bytes (like "On", "Off", or sensor data like "215"), then wifi is across the board many levels more complex than is needed.
Flutter isn't the minimum needed, but it's essentially the minimum needed to build a secure mesh solution.
And unlike wifi modules, we have bare metal control over our radio chip, which gives us a lot more room for doing interesting things, like indoor 3D positioning (which we haven't tested yet, so I have no statistics on the accuracy... yet).
The cool thing is, we will research indoor positioning, and every other use of this board we can. I think an open radio and computing module with encryption, long range comms, and ultra low power usage (sleep modes should allow for a year on a coin cell, though again, that has not been verified yet).
Flutter is using CC1001/CC1200, which are 900MHz radios. 900MHz (as a longer wave) will travel much farther to begin with, plus the module is designed for longer-range use :)
(Also if you put a 900MHz antenna on a 2.4GHz radio you're gonna have a bad time)
https://www.sparkdevices.com/
I wonder if it would be possible to wire an antenna to the Spark and match the 1km range of the Flutter....