Does any know if Particles costing policy has changed or if it’s the same as a post made 3years ago. If we use our own SIM on a boron connected to the Particle cloud?
Would we pay the Cellular monthly subscription ($299 as of today) or the WiFi monthly ($99).
Currently Particle don’t offer LTE Borons in AUS/NZ using their sims, however using our own connecting to Particle cloud works successfully, and we are expecting a large order soon which will push us over the 100 device free tier limit.
The Free Plan works pretty much the same for Particle SIM, Wi-Fi, and 3rd-party SIM: Up to 100 devices, 100K data operations per month. Above 100 devices, in the growth tier, there is no price break for 3rd-party SIM cards.
The exception is that with a 3rd-party SIM card if you are using data outside of the Particle cloud (direct TCP or UDP), you would not be subject to the 100 MB of cellular data per month limit across your cellular fleet as you’d pay your 3rd-party SIM provider separately.
The recommended model for Australia and New Zealand is the B Series SoM B524 or Tracker SoM T524.
The Boron LTE M1 EtherSIM (BRN404) is not officially supported in Australia. However, if you configure the MNO profile on an LTE M1 device, it will likely work with the EtherSIM Particle SIM. This is not recommended for fleet deployments as it’s not an officially supported configuration.
It seems that this is a very difficult question to answer. So may I ask a different simplified scenario one instead please.
I have 101 Boron LTE M1 currently out in the Field in Australia. They each use a 3rd party sim and connect to a third party back end services. If I wanted to change the back end service to use the Particle cloud instead but remain on using the 3rd party sim, how much would I need to pay a month?
At 101 devices, you are in the growth tier, 1 block, based on number of devices. The price for cellular (720K data operators) is $299/month. The price is the same whether you’re using the Particle SIM or not. With the Particle SIM you are limited to 540MB of cellular data per block. With a 3rd-party SIM you are not limited by cellular data, but you still have the 720K data operations limit (publish, subscribe, functions, and variables).
So essentially if you are a 3rd party SIM user and pushing data through the Particle back end you get screwed out of $200/month for cellular data that you are not using. It should be the $99/month per 1 block of 720K data operations, that would be fair.