Publish() rate limit for a Product

NOTE: Currently, a device can publish at rate of about 1 event/sec, with bursts of up to 4 allowed in 1 second. Back to back burst of 4 messages will take 4 seconds to recover.

Question: For a Product, are the rate limits the same?

I’ve never really got a conclusive answer on that.

For products you have got a monthly limit depending on your price tier and the 1/sec with burst of 4 is baked into the firmware, so it will apply (unless you remove it from the system yourself).

But what I sometimes suspected (by reports of others) but never got confirmed nor denied was that it seems as if the monthly quota would also be scaled down.
e.g. 250K/month would mean equal to about 1 per 10sec across all devices in that product - which would be bad but would expain some things reported by members.

@tylercpeacock, anything on that?

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Thanks @ScruffR,

The device I’m OK with.

I’m publishing server-side so I’m wondering if there is some sort of throttling on that end, too.

All the more reason people are begging to emable secure MQTT messaging so they can send data directly to Azure or Amazon to eliminate the Particle webhook limits. I feel we are getting closer to that being a reality.

The baked in device limit shouldn’t have any extra limitations just due to being used in a product, outside of what we list on our pricing page. That is, the 250k hard limit which we don’t impose until the customer actually hits that.

When using the fleet management tools of the Console, we leave it to the customer to limit themselves accordingly. Yes, if they have 25 devices and they publish as much as every device will possibly let them they may hit the 250k and be cut off for the remainder of the month. However if that’s something that is needed, we recommend moving up a tier.

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Have you guys looked at revisiting those limits? They have caused us so much hassle in the last year, because at your ratios, each device basically gets to publish one event every five minutes. I know that may be sufficient for many use cases, but some of us want to publish at a much higher frequency, as we’re tracking data that can change much faster than that.

We’re going to be forced to abandoned webhooks for an insecure solution, effectively denying you any revenue at all, because while we could justify $279/month for our current install base, we have just grown out of that, and are now being told to cough up $2k/month for a plan where we’ll be using 15% of the capacity we’re paying for? It makes no sense. On top of that, if we exceed the allotted number of events, you just shut us down and we lose customer data, rather than at least offering some sort of overage or a la carte pricing.

Hi @polystyrene

Thank you for the feedback, that’s valuable.

We’re always trying to better understand how we can align our pricing and service tiers to better support our community and product creators, and we certainly don’t want you to feel like you need to choose a less secure option. Sometimes our sales team is able to help find customized solutions for creators like yourselves when the posted self-service tiers don’t quite make sense. I’m happy to have someone from the team reach out and see if they can help if you want.

Thanks,
David

Thanks, @Dave. I appreciate that. I’m waiting on a support request on it from this morning already, hence reaching out here as well when I happened to come across mention of the limits and pricing. Hopefully there will be a happy medium for customers in our situation.

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@Dave, I haven’t heard back from anyone on the support ticket in days, so do you mind having someone contact me after all? Thanks.

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Hi @polystyrene,

Sure I’ll ask and see what’s up.

Thanks,
David

Thanks!