Thanks mariaShin!!!
Not at all.
I have paid for energy to last. Then B is saying it will stop supporting the system i have invested in. Also giving an offer. This offer was very vague, easy to miss and really too short in time. If you didnât jump on within a quite short time frame, the offer was gone.
I remember I looked very fast at the new Blynk IoT and found it (then) to be too inmature in features and documentation to jump on to. It did not offer some things I already had in Legacy.
This is my standpoint.
I fully understand B has to change business model to make money. But you donât remove things you have sold to people. You keep supporting or make sure you offer good compensations.
I have 2 Swe providers in similar situation.
- X sold to fix price to Consumers. They realized they could not make sustainable business. They switched to selling services to Business customers. They donât sell to Consumers anymore - but existing customers can still after some 5 (?) years still use the system and do get updates. ( Funny enough I do integrate this system in my home automation and can for example read energy usage in my blynk app.)
- Y sold systems to Consumers including a cloud access. The local system technology (radio frequency) is old and a bit outdated. They now offer a more modern technology and sell that. But, they keep the old system still running and always keeps offerings to upgrade to the new modern system. They seem to want everyone to change, but they do keep the old system running.
Both companies are Swedish and operating (operated in the first case) on a Swedish consumer market. I guess the difference.
I will not comment more on this issue. My point should be clear.
I do like Blynk. I do pay for PLUS. I would actually be willing to pay more if Blynk offered me (some examples, not all):
- Compensation for Legacy. This is a question of trust.
- More datastreams and widgets per template/device. I donât see why restricting this, better to restrict database usage and/or data transfer. Example; 100 data transfers per hour or xx MB per day, or something. I think this better correlates to Bs cost. I think.
- Better User system. I really lack the possibility to have letâs say 10 devices/projects and define who in a family can see which device/project. Seems with PLUS all members can see all devices/projects. Even if you transfer device/projects. This, I feel is quite limiting.
I donât need more devices or more users. I need more âdataâ (widgets and datastreams) and more flexible user access/view system.
I would be willing to pay for that.
// Now back to our Midsummer festivities âŚ
I agree, hence this little rant a while agoâŚ
As far as your other expectations are concerned then I guess weâll agree to disagree. However, I guess from your comments that youâve never used Adobe Photoshop because Adobe seem to be world leaders at screwing every last drop of revenue out of their licence holders year on year.
Pete.
This monthâs Adobe invoice was around 1800 EUR. I know the game âŚ
It all depends on what you pay $5 for.
Sorry, but if you think that in Ukraine consumers are used to paying $5 per month for a mobile app, Iâm afraid youâre wrong. They want to buy and use. So here you have to figure out how to get out of the situation.
Personally, I use either the free or plus plan at the moment. In the plus plan, there is no other solution than to include a subscription for a year in advance in the cost of the project.
P.S. The solution in terms of plus limited roles - when all users see all devices - is complete nonsense. Excuse me, but this is my opinion as a Blynk user for over 4 years.
I have got a message I can have 50% off as I bought stuff on old blynk, canât see it anymore and donât remember how to get it.
Please advise
Please check your PMs.
I love the new 2.0 , life goes on and you have to move forward, sure we all are going to miss the old blynk but hey all good things will eventually come to an end. people donât like change no matter what. change is a good thingâŚ
I think 5 dollars is not enough to pay monthly, but 60 in a single payment is a lot. Iâm already starting to do the math to see if itâs worth it for my little use and if it fits this month or Iâll have to wait for a financial break in another month later.
Anyone else have the annoying iOS badge notification? Cannot seem to clear the badge and my ocd is going wild.
@Eugene my iPad shows the badge, but my iPhone doesnât. This is my iPadâŚ
Both have Badges turned on for Blynk Legacy, and I can of course hide the badge by turning off badges for the legacy app in settings, so itâs not really an issue.
Pete.
Oh I see. The app donât clear the badge as we never set badges in our platform pushes. So looks like there was a mistake with latest marketing notifications (they didnât know it wonât go away)
Yeah, just disallow badge in system Settings â Blynk â Notifications
you are very right. I will do the same. it doesnât seem normal to me what the Blynks are doing. I buy âenergyâ, my application made by me works for a while, after which I wake up that I donât know what changes they want to make, and nothing of what I did will work for me, and which I struggled with I worked. Iâm extremely upset like most users, and I know Blynkâs developers donât care. Iâll probably drop Blink at some point.
Surely I will not buy anything of the new application knowing how they behave ⌠who knows that in a few months they will not change their mind again and close this project too or make it pay 10 times more. As long as we talk about purchasing services with the monthly contract, everything is fine, but when it comes to application development, what I buy must remain intact until I retire it. These behaviors are a symptom of a company that is not serious and it is better to stay away.
Do you feel the same way about Microsoft, and do you use any of their products?
Over the years Microsoft have done exactly the same thing, changing their product architecture when needed, and moving from a one-off purchase to a subscription based system for products like MS Office. Itâs a fact of life when it comes to product development and financial sustainability.
Blynkâs previous business model was one where one-off Energy purchases didnât cover their ongoing cloud server costs, and the company was reliant on corporate sales to subsidise these costs and pay their other overheads.
In this scenario, the company would have been unable to fund new development and the product would have stagnated. This would have meant that it wasnât attractive to new corporate customers and that existing corporate customers would have gone elsewhere, leading to the collapse of the company.
The new business model makes the charges for the cloud services more realistic, and provides a steady stream of income for the company. If Blynk hadnât gone down this route then I suspect that eventually the company would have folded and we wouldnât have the option to migrate to the new version of Blynk at all.
If the new version of Blynk, and itâs pricing structure, donât appeal to you then look at the alternatives and migrate to one of them if it suits you better.
But my advice would be not to expect anything to last forever in the IoT world, and that if a pricing model appears too good to be true then in the long term it probably is. Make sure you donât find yourself jumping âout of the frying pan into the fireâ.
Pete.
The products purchased by me from microsoft (such as window xp, window 7, office 2007 etc.) are still fully functional on the computers on which they are installed. Surely they are no longer updated but no one forces me to change them to put a new version with a different license. This is the big difference. Without much discussion. They have behaved badly and many people will agree with me.
Those basic products may still work, but the scanner you bought for your Windows XP machine wonât work with your Windows 10 machine, and some of the software that you ran on your XP machine wonât run on Wh our Windows 10 machine either.
And, if youâd spent lots of time developing Access databases and Excel/Word automations in Office â97 youâd have been very disappointed to find that they needed totally rewriting if you wanted them to work with later versions.
Things change, and we have to adapt.
I wouldnât waste time worrying about whether others agree with you. You need to find an IoT solution to suit your personal needs, and time is running out for Legacy cloud users. Finding an alternative and implementing will be a time consuming process for most people.
Pete.
Iâll tell you what doesnât seem ânormal:â 5 years ago I paid the cost of a lunch to Blynk for an app, support, continued development, docs, etc. Great uptime on the app and api. Notifications were reliable. Seemingly unlimited writes and reads. Strong community support⌠Blynk has probably been my least expensive web service. Every year that I used Blynk for home automation and work proof of concept stuff Iâd think, âI wonder when theyâre going to come asking for more money?â Iâm glad theyâre switching to a more sustainable pricing model. I assume the people that work for Blynk, like you, have families, require food and water, like living indoors, etc., but also want to see what theyâve created grow. I can assure you, all of this is normal.
Yes, for all the trouble that we were deprived of an excellent and almost free Legacy product, you need to understand that the main function of a business project is to make a profit. You should not expect from the developers what they are not going to give, and then everything will be fine)
It must be admitted that Blynk 2.0, due to the fact that it is paid, inspires some trust and reliability, because you understand that as long as people pay for it, it will certainly exist and develop - this is good.