There is a subscription service, but it’s not required. I don’t have it, but my pet got fed during the outage so maybe there’s a different line of devices that don’t work without the subscription…

Just paid $500 for the privilege in PA ($250/yr, paid upfront).

I got on-the-job training to be a pharmacy tech at a Walgreens while I was in college. My state required that you be licensed at the national and state level, but it was just a test and some continuing education credits.

My current state doesn’t require either, so the techs are definitely skewed younger. Thankfully I finished college and work elsewhere now so I can only guess at their ages but teenagers seems accurate.