Good morning,
I saw the new prices. I am very disappointed… And not excited at all… I started a few months ago a project with a colleague. After the project part, we started the production and the pcbs are just completed. The goal (not so far) is to reach and exceed 1000 devices by the middle of 2017. Obviously we agreed with the customer an annual maintenance fee, but our device costs about $100, so the fee could not be high.
Of course we have chosen Particle both the hardware and the software and cloud services.
But in this new terms we are out of business. How can we ask the customer for more than $20k a year?
When a company changes the payment plans, there will be always someone who pays more, and maybe someone who pays less. Ok, you say that we will have more services than those with $ 49 / month. But $ 1,799 / month are 37 times more than before … Do you really belive to provide services 37 times better? And if we were already good with services that you offer last week? Have you completely changed your target, now Particle is a useful platform for people who want to play the “little engineer” and not for those who want to work …
In the cloud we only save some log data (in our infrastructure). The only functions of Particle Cloud that we really use are the OTA updates and online / offline status. And will it costs us about $21/device per year (1001 devices)??? How is it possible? After a year and a half we lost our gain on the device, after two years we will lose thousands of bucks …
I saw that the Keurig coffee machine uses the P1. I guess they have sold more than 10k machines so, If a coffee machine lifecycle is about 6-7 years, they will have to pay you about $30 for every coffe machine? so maybe they increase of 20% the coffe machine price? Unbelievable…
We’ve already used services that then they changed prices. But for old customers they keep the old conditions. Your behavior was nothing about fairness. We are losing money, time and probably a good customer, If we can’t fix this in time…
I’m sorry, but we have to find another solution and rebuild all the project, hoping not to find another company that wakes up one morning and rises up the prices of 3000%…
Same here. I am just using the Dashboard for OTA software updates. On average maybe once or twice per year for each device. The devices are always offline (SEMI_AUTOMATIC) mode and are only connected to the clould when an upgrade is required. Customers like flavio or me now have to pay for all those cool features and support, but which are not needed at all. Maybe a pricing tier with ‘no events’, ‘no support’, ‘nor SLA’ for something like 1$ per device per year would be appropriate.
+1
Same here as Flavio and ahk. I am not interested at all about cloud events. Our fleet management would be about firmware and app updates only
I’m in the same situation as Flavio. Only intressted in the OTA and maybe some simple stats on how devices is active (not necessary).
I like the prototy level, wich I think is necessary!
But then I would really need to see some cheap solution when you don’t need all the advanced features and primary using it for OTA.
I need to be able to sell cheap units without the customer paying an yearly fee! Mainly supporting OTA for at least 3 years for the sold device.
There is no price plan now that covers this simple case of simple devices with OTA!
The new price plan makes me think that I might have done a bad decision going with the P1 module for my current development.
If the prices are going to look like this then I will have to go for another platform or make my own solution for the OTA.
As a small guy with products on the design table using the Particle devices I’m also interested in the new pricing terms.
For 1001 - 10,000 devices connected were looking at the following pricing per month per device.
1001 units / $1999 monthly cost = $1.99 per connected device. That’s $1.99 x 12 Months = $23 yearly per device.
2,500 units / $1999 monthly cost = $0.79 per connected device. That’s $0.79 x 12 Months = $9.59 yearly per device.
5,000 units / $1999 monthly cost = $0.39 per connected device. That’s $0.39 x 12 Months = $4.68 yearly per device.
7500 units / $1999 monthly cost = $0.26 per connected device. That’s $0.26 x 12 Months = $3.19 yearly per device.
10,000 units / $1999 monthly cost = $0.19 per connected device. That’s $0.19 x 12 Months = $2.28 yearly per device.
It looks like the guys with 1001-5000 devices are going to need plan on charging their customers a ongoing fee for web connectivity in their product if they do not want to create a $2,000 monthly bill that never ends for their business.
I’m sure some products will easily be able to charge a monthly fee to cover web connectivity but other low cost devices may have a hard time selling somebody on a monthly or yearly $25, $15 fee to get the data online.
I see offering a few months of web connectivity as a option and then the customer will have to be charged if they want that web connection features.
But as a business if I have 1001 products out in the field it looks like I will be stuck with a $1,999 bill every month regardless if the customer decides to pay for the web connectivity after the free trial.
Can we delete the product from the console if the client decides they do not want to pay for the online connectivity to keep the device online? Or do you have to leave the device in the console once you have assigned to a customer who purchased the product?
I see the next big cost as the database platform if you want to store the data being sent by the Particle device to be viewed online which is not cheap either. It would be nice if some sort of database service was included in the $1999 price.
I think the pricing structure for the guys in the 1000-2500 product number range still needs adjusted since it’s good for Particle but bad for the product creators and for the customers in situations where its hard to justify the monthly cost for the customer when it comes to cost vs benefits of the web connectivity.
I’m beginning to see IOT back end cost can end up being really expensive if your customers are not willing to cover these expenses.
It will be interesting to see how this all plays out over time.
Thanks for the good discussion. Fundamentally the concern comes down to this: if you make a product that you sell for a fixed margin, how do you pay for the back-end to support that product (Particle or otherwise)?
The reality of IoT is that connected devices require back-end infrastructure in order to operate. Regardless of how you build your infrastructure, you’re going to be paying monthly/annual fees. That’s true if you use Particle or if you build your own infrastructure.
When it comes to justifying that cost, there are a few ways to do it, and it depends on your business model:
- Bake it into the margin of the product (i.e. charge more for each device)
- Charge your customers a monthly/annual fee
- Use the connected nature of your product to generate ongoing business value (e.g. improve the quality of your marketing or customer service through the data you collect from devices)
- Treat it as a “cost of doing business” - an unavoidable cost that is simply necessary for the business to function (like the cost of hiring employees or paying for an office)
Which of those paths you choose to take depends entirely on your business.
Hope that’s helpful!
I understand what you mean, but in my opinion it’s not so simple.
If you make products for industry, you can charge a monthly/annual fee, it’s not a problem, but if you make a product for customer users, how can you make them pay you every year? The market doesn’t go in this way… Look at iot devices form netgear, dlink and all these companies… You buy a camera, a garage door opener, an rgb light… They don’t charge you every year… I’m Italian and in Italy the ioT concept is still unripe… and we use to pay, turn on and go. The only way is to make pay a little bit more the product and give the connectivity. Our product in 10 years will be old, so the customers will buy a new version. If the business model is something like “2$ a year up to 1000 devices, then 1$” (i don’t invented it, there are iot services with these prices) it would be easier to evaluate and proportional. In this case we will build our cloud. Ok, maybe for 100 devices it will be more expensive then yours, but for 1001 devices it would be much cheaper.
Regards, Flavio
Do I misunderstand that the fees are only if we need to create a "product" in the console?
If we do not need fleet "functions" , we can still use OTA with any number of devices?
Based on this quote---
I’M A DEVELOPER / MAKER, AND I AM NOT CREATING A PRODUCT; WHAT DOES THIS MEAN FOR ME?
Regardless of the quantity of dev kits you’ve purchased or deployed, these prices will not apply to you unless you specifically choose to group your devices together as a ‘product’ in the Particle Console. If you do not create a ‘product’, then your devices will continue to have Particle Cloud access, as always, with no additional platform fees.
@pmjackson - you are correct! The platform pricing only applies to devices grouped as a product. You can still use OTA with any number of devices, although you will only be able to OTA one device at a time.
And a simple question, just to clarify - is the console open sourced ? Can I run the private particle cloud and private particle console on my own servers without paying to Particle ?
No, the Console is not open source; you can run spark-server but it doesn’t include any of the features exposed in the Particle Console. The clearest metaphor here is like Git vs. Github; Git is an open source version control system, and Github is a SaaS product built on Git that allows you to manage your source code.
Thanks @zach !
Dear community - any volunteers to build an open-sourced particle-console-like portal ?
That should not be very difficult, and can have limited functionality, the automatic firmware upgrades for the fleet as the minimum. Shouldn’t be very difficult using Cloud API. What do you think ?
We may not have other option with this pricing…
Anyone interested ?
Spark-server is not bad. i tryed it today and it works… You can see when you publish, call functions, see vars and make ota update, all via cli. There is no claim neither web intercace, you have to develope it on your own.
Sounds like your are not expecting any products to be built with your modules that are not IoT!
I think P1 is a nice integrated module to a reasonable price, to built cheap none IoT products on.
But it would be nice to be able to have your OTA for the product, but that seems like it’s not going to happen in any usable form.
So now we need to decide how to proceed, switch moduel or make or own OTA solution.
It depends about the meaning of I letter: we are targeting Intranet of Things, not Internet 
... and I fear we are in a minority group here....
Ehm.... since the discussion about new price model totally covered my ouverture, could someone at Particle (@zachary ? @jeiden ?) reply about my question ? It's rather important, to me....
Thanks a lot
Thanks @zach for sharing your considerations with us. I was just thinking at the way to justify the cost in order to stay with Particle and your post comes to help me. So you say:
1 - Charge more for each device. Yes, I could do it if I know exactly how much is the annual cost for my device but I can’t know it because price per device depends on tiers. As someone else said selling 1100 devices for a product changes everything…
2 - Charge your customers a monthly/annual fee. No way to do it, customers do not use to pay for having a device connected
3 - Use the connected nature of your product to generate ongoing business value. I’m not a big company, my business model is to design and sell a connected products to resellers or final customers giving them the IOT cloud service included, so my profit depends only on my product costs by now.
4 - Treat it as a “cost of doing business” like paying for an office. Like above this could be ok for some but not for me.
So this means my business model is not good enough to let me stay with Particle. I can accept this and moving on.
But my last question is: why don’t you propose a price per device like 2$ a year with limited resource and/or limited services?
Whereas the console might not be viable, that shouldn't be a reason to abandon the platform. The console makes managing the devices easier for sure, but depending on the scale of what you're trying to to, you might be able to pull it off yourself as well.
Wait. Are you saying if you are not using the console for device management, the new pricing model does not apply to you?