Introducing our new pricing model with free development for up to 100 devices

Also, if you have a Sandbox account, click your user in the top right to see your usage:
SB

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Back of the envelope:

  • 100k D.O./Month = Max 1 D.O. every 26 seconds
  • 45MB/Month @ 1 D.O./26sec = 450 Bytes per D.O.
  • 45MB/Month @ 622B (Max D.O.) = ~72k D.O. /month

Morals of the story:

  • Using WiFi expect to publish once or twice per minute total across all endpoints
  • Using cellular the protocol & transport overhead may come into play so check your usage.

How big the overhead for a Particle publish? I would expect it to include syntax, names, encapsulation, crypto, session & IP, is that correct? In terms of bits is a publish verbose or lean? Are publishes compressed?

msglen = Messages::event(message.buf(), 0, event_name, data, data_size, ttl, event_type, confirmable);

Hey @idea - I think your math is off here, you lost a zero along the way.

We designed these data caps based on an analysis of actual usage over the course of the last few months and set them high enough that no customer using the platform as intended would hit these caps; they're in place to protect against runaway devices. In practice, no one sends exactly 622 bytes every message; some messages are larger and some messages are smaller, and the average is always significantly lower than the max size.

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Thanks for the reply Zach! And thanks for creating Particle, I’ve certainly enjoyed following its development and it’s exciting to see it grow into new spaces, even if I’m not in the target geography.

You’re right I missed a zero, should be x10, I corrected the post. Thank you, and kudos for staying connected to the community.

Appreciate it. By the way also appreciate your feedback above on communications. It's a challenging tap dance because the thing we didn't want to do was announce a free tier and then keep charging people, which I think would have generated even more frustration; that's why we did the free tier transition immediately and are doing the growth tier transition this summer. But feedback noted and welcomed.

Cheers! Something else to think about is that there are lots of rural places with marginal cell signal, I would love to see a Boron LTE CAT-M1 style devboard with a directional antenna, or else a directional antenna certified for use with EtherSIM boards.

That and a PPK-GPS solution for on premises tracking. In my imagination, a “monument” outdoor permanent base station on wired PoE and compatible rovers with WiFi and or Cellular, battery powered.

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This new pricing system is crazy. Before it was based on actual data used. I coded my electron to publish small amounts of data more often to get a better real-time data stream. That’s what my customer prices are based off. You charged so much per device for the data sent. Now you want to charge per publish which is going to severely increase my pricing and make my current customer pricing structure unusable. To get readings published every 2.5 minutes (which was alway under 3mb per month) I’m going to have to buy a block that will only cover 40 devices at that rate compared to a 100 devices at the old rate. How is this change justified? I can’t be the only user that uses low data publishing like this that will not be able to continue operations like I currently do because of this change. I was also transferred to the free tier since I have only been using a few devices simply because my customers haven’t installed them yet. Once they are on it won’t take long to hit that data operations limit. Then it’s pay $300 a month instead of the $40 I’m currently at or have my business suspended until the next month which isn’t really an option. This change as is seems like a small business killer.

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Hey @Drinaldi – let’s see if we can find a path forward that works for you. I’ll send you a DM now to discuss further.

Hi Will, looks like I am going to need some assistance with this as well.
We have roughly 250 devices(Photons) and roughly 150 of those send 2-3 publishes every 3 seconds. Slowly and gradually increasing devices.
Each device firmware is customised, so sending out an update is going to be a Very big task.
Can we also look into my account and see how I will be affected so we can find a smooth way to remedy this?

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Hey Nick! I suggest you proactively send a DM to Will to start the conversation. Best of luck!

Respectfully: My LTE Borons post small Base64-encoded binary packets every 60 seconds. Looks like the new pricing will kill me for penalizing high frequency/low data vs. low frequency/high data.

The competitor charges $0.10/mb/month for LTE data, no further questions asked.

The people of Particle are such nice and supportive people in my experience, but their decisions have not always impressed me.

I would appreciate an email from someone at Particle telling me how much my bill will be.

This is after I spent a lot of time refactoring code to use Particle.publish() instead of MQTT, and waiting for Particle to fix the Serial1 RX crash, which now seems to be a lost-cause. The data cost I saved from eliminating MQTT overhead seems like it will be outweighed in the new pricing by the extent to which “Data operations” are charged vs mb/month.

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Hey Paul, I invite you to DM Will or open a support ticket, so you reduce the risk of someone from Particle missing your post. Cheers

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I for one think this is great. As the developer for both small-scale and large-scale applications, this will reduce or eliminate any upfront costs other than the hardware. My smaller-scale customers will likely have zero-costs while the bigger customers will have a simpler plan (haven’t figured out if the cost will change).

I will no longer have to pay to maintain my development devices while I wait for the next project/customer. Thanks Particle!

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I'm really curious how Particle handles a case like yours. 150 devices sending 2 publishes every 3 seconds is about 260 million publishes per month if my arithmetic is right. On the new plan $100 for 720k publishes over wifi, that will need around 360 data blocks or $36,000 per month.

Was the old plan still 30 cents per device per month? So for 250 devices, $75? $75/month to $36,000/month would be quite a bit of a fee increase.

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@zach On the free plan I’ve just been switched to, even though I was happy to pay on the old plan, I will need to reduce my publish time from every 20 minutes to every 30 minutes to stay under the limits.

Regarding bandwidth, saying OTA updates, network connections, etc. are free is misleading. If you read the fine print on your site, those all contribute to your monthly data allotment, which is incredibly small.

And most importantly, you state that there are NO OVERAGES. Again reading the fine print, that means (and you state) that if you exceed your data operations limit or monthly data transfer limit your account will be SUSPENDED until the next month. Completely unacceptable. I’d rather pay overage fees than have my entire fleet shut down.

EDIT: Doing a little more math - Under the new plan, to stay within 100,000 data operations per month, each device publishing only 3x per hour, assuming no other data usage or data operations (not possible) I could have up to about 45 devices active before you shut down my account. That assumes no other data operations are performed like function calls or use of variables, or events that get published on startup (which happens in rural areas frequently). It also doesn’t take into consideration that publishing a new deviceOS version and firmware OTA could easily cause account suspension even with just 45 or so devices.

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Hi @picsil - as we've mentioned to others, if you were transitioned to a free plan it's because you are below the threshold for billing under the new model, but we are happy to work with you directly to set up a better path forward. Send a DM to @will or contact our support team at support.particle.io and we will take care of you there.

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How much is Growth Tier / one block?

How much is Growth Tier / two blocks?

Is there a set price, or is it individually negotiated?

Hi @will and @zach

This announcement and the automatic migration definitely feels a bit abrupt.

We’re a small tech team that’s been really grateful for all the work Particle has done on the platform side of things to minimize the overhead for a lean team like ours. We are currently in the process of scaling our product and are currently in touch with members of your sales and engineering teams who have been really helpful!

Moving from a pay-per-device to a pay-per-data-operation however fundamentally changes our business logic, and the way we use particle devices. This moves our development efforts back at least a few weeks while we try to figure out new ways to re-architect our system to meet your new pricing model under the block framework.

I was around for the time when support for mesh was withdrawn, and while that was a different kind of change, it engenders similar feelings of not being consulted and having been caught by surprise…

@sampath1,

I hear your concerns here and apologize if these changes felt abrupt. I'd like to explain why we chose to roll this out the way that we did,, as I think it will highlight that we are rolling this out in the way that we think is best for customers.

All of Particle's self-service customers fall into one of two buckets:

Eligible for the Free Plan. The largest number of individual customers affected by our new pricing are eligible for the Free Plan. Many of those customers are currently paying subscriptions. We made the decisions to migrate these customers immediately to the free plan because we thought it would be very frustrating for customers to hear from us that our platform was going to be free, but continue to receive a bill. I know it might be hard to imagine the alternative but I strongly believe that we would have gotten a lot more complaints if we had followed that path.

Eligible for the Growth Plan. For folks who are going to be covered by the new Growth Plan, we are not changing our billing model until July, providing a three month migration window where people can get to know the new model and adjust behaviors to accommodate the new model if necessary to do so. We also sent individual email communications to each person in this group to provide additional discounting where necessary to ensure that bills wouldn't go up.

We want to do everything we can to work with the individuals who have been expressing concern in this thread, who are generally people currently under the Free Tier that intend to scale out of it in the near future. We are working with customers who do so to help give them a good path that works for their businesses. The reason we're asking folks to reach out to our support team at support.particle.io or contact us directly is that, since these concerns relate to future scaling plans, we can't make accommodations for those plans without knowing what they are.

Hi, you can find the info on the pricing page:

image

one block is $299, two blocks are $598 (per month)

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