I had a Blynk 1.0 project that I was tinkering with back in 2019 timeframe, and got sidetracked by life. I recently returned to it, and learned that the old software and pricing model had been permanently retired.
My project = a temperature tracking project for smoking meat/etc on a grill. A Raspberry Pi, with a pair of RTD temperature sensors, reading temperatures from the cooker, and sending those temperatures to a smartphone, for monitoring. Features included the ability to send high and low alarms, track high/low/average statistics, and the ability to record (save) the temperature vs time plotted data.
When I left off back in 2019, the Blynk screens and python back end software was completed, and I was working on trying to put the Pi and RTD sensors into some sort of containing box. Then I got sidetracked and put the project on hold.
I just recently returned to it, and discovered that the software is now Blynk 2.0, but the real problem is, the new pricing tiers have wrecked my little project. I need more than 10 datastreams, I need to be able to put 2 datastreams on the charts, etc, and I can’t do either of those without upgrading to the next level. I hope you can understand why I am not willing to spend $7/month = $84/year in a subscription fee, just for my little hobby project.
I understand what you are attempting to do to monetize the project. My general comment is, I think you have overly restricted the capabilities of your free tier.
My request: Could you please consider
loosening up some of the restrictions on your free tier. For me, that would mean allowing up to 50 or so datastreams, and allowing more than 1 datastream on the Chart widget.
OR 2) consider an alternative pricing model? I am not willing to sign up for a semi-pricey subscription service just for my hobbyist projects, but I would be willing to pay a reasonable one-time fee for those features I need.
I’m not speaking on behalf of Blynk here, but this issue has been discussed at great length in other topics and I’m 100% certain that what you’re asking for isn’t going to happen.
Blynk made a mistake when they went for the “Energy” purchase model in Blynk Legacy, because that wasn’t financially sustainable. Blynk were committing to an infinitely long period of ingoing project hosting, with no ongoing revenue to cover those costs. Instead, revenue from business customers was being used to subsidise the costs associated with projects like yours.
When Blynk IoT was released the features of the Free subscription were more generous than they are now, and Blynk have been tweaking and restricting those features to make them sufficient for potential users to test the system out before migrating to a paid plan.
The bottom-line is that Blynk had to do this in order to survive, and that’s what they’ve done.
There aren’t many viable alternatives to Blynk IoT, and the nearest competitor is probably Arduino Cloud. If you take a look at the Arduino Cloud pricing model you’ll see that you get less functionality in their free subscription, and that their paid subscriptions are generally more expensive than Blynk IoT.
I’m afraid that it is what it is, and it’s almost certainly not going to change in your favour, but that’s just my opinion though.
You can try ESPRainmaker. But it doesn’t even come close to Blynk when it comes to customisation and widgets on offer.
But as you are on free plan, you will not have access to all the Blynk widgets and rainmaker can save your project. But its kind of hard to get this working. It will be a tough journey.
To Pete and Mad: Thank you very much for the suggested alternatives, I will give them a look.
To Blynk: My marketing feedback to you, as a potential customer with $$ to spend that you are (sadly) never going to see under your current pricing model, is you are missing the hobbyist part of your marker.
My personal small hobbyist needs do not justify a subscription. I suspect that is true for most hobbyists who are just building things for their personal use around the house. The subscription is a deal breaker.
I would suggest for you to come up with a hobbyist tier, that involves reasonable one-time fees to unlock various features. Find a sweet spot where the hobbyist tier is somewhere between the free tier and subscription tier in terms of capability.
I would probably be a customer for you then. I certainly engage in that behavior now, I buy every new Pi or Pi-clone that shows up on the market, I buy ESP32 and ESP8266 chips, I buy various sensors, and on and on. Sometimes my projects go to sleep for several years (like this one), and then wake up again. My point = hobbyists are willing to spend money on a one-time basis, to tinker and play with, but we’re not going to spend money on subscriptions. Subscription fees just do not match our use case.
A side benefit of keeping Blynk in the hands of hobbyists is that you will make Blynk even more ubiquitous in the market, which obviously helps your long term growth prospects.
Good luck. My comments are made under the assumption that you’d like to keep the hobbyist, consumer market, and not ignore it just to focus on B2B marketing. Assuming you do wish to keep the hobbyist market, I hope you see and consider this feedback.
Best,
Elliott
PS - Or, remove the feature-locks, and then just sell ads at the free tier. We’ve all got apps on our phones that do that.
Ads have been discussed before and are a non-starter. Advertisers want exposure, and the Blynk customer base doesn’t provide that.
In addition, the process of finding advertisers costs more money than the revenue it generates for a company like Blynk, and the cost of modifying the app to play adverts and track views also outweighs revenue generation.
As I said, or at least alluded to earlier, one-off fees in exchange for perpetual commitment by Blynk doesn’t really work. Blynk wants to secure investment so that they can expand and develop, and investors want to see ongoing revenue streams rather than sporadic and unpredictable one-off payments. Blynk also needs steady revenue to meet its commitments -paying staff, covering hosting fees, servicing loans etc.
Investors view small one-off payments in exchange for increased corporate commitment and liability as something to be avoided rather than encouraged.
The issue of whether a large hobbyist user base ultimately leads to a larger uptake of the product by others, or the same people who use it when students and eventually may want to use it later in a corporate environment, has also been debated at length.
The general consensus is that it doesn’t really work that way, and the cost of servicing the free (or virtually free) user base far outweighs the revenue that may be generated from these people in future.
There are quite a few topics where all of this has been discussed at length, and the owners of Blynk have made their views known. It’s good when people share new ideas and perspectives, but TBH none of what you’ve said already been asked and answered over the past couple of years on the forum.
Hi Pete, although it sounds like you aren’t a Blynk representative, you are providing a lot of great historical context, so thanks.
That said - I think I disagree with the implication that there is a choice to be made here, to either support subscriptions, OR single sales. You can do both, you don’t have to pick.
The only reasons I can see not to do both:
There is a concern that single sales might cannibalize subscription sales. With a little thought, I think the models could be set up so that didn’t occur.
Blynk just doesn’t have the resources to support both models. That may be true, I really can’t judge.
If neither of those is true, then there is no reason not to figure out a way to take the hobbyist sales money too.
Hey @Blynk, your pricing model is about to force me to walk away and find a replacement for you, but I’d rather give my $$ to you, please figure out how to take it!
I’m not, just a Blynk user and one of the forum moderators.
I think the point that you’re missing here is that, although you might not realise it, providing extra features such as additional datastreams, devices etc does actually have a real cost to Blynk.
The size of the database that holds this information increases, and more server resources are required to service your account. In addition, more code development and server-side resources are needed to check the permissions for each account before each server-side operation is performed. It also bumps-up code complexity, backup costs, server admin costs etc etc.
Adding extra features for a one-off payment generates a small income for Blynk today, but ultimately costs them more in future, so doesn’t make good business sense.
As developers, they’re going to want a clean and well structured server-side codebase and app codebase which is simple to maintain. The more “special case” scenarios that Blynk creates, the more complex their code development process gets. I’m fairly certain that this is one of the reasons why Blynk is reluctant to make their current subscription options more flexible by adding-in additional permissions for a slightly increased monthly/annual cost.
Blynk have created “tiers” of functionality that cover a variety of scenarios in a way which works from a billing and revenue generation perspective, as well as from a code maintenance and development perspective. The cost of a monthly “Plus” subscription is slightly less than a typical Amazon Prime, Spotify or Netflix subscription, and actually represents excellent value for money compared to the very small number of rival products on the market and is orders of magnitude cheaper than commissioning someone to write a custom app for you.
I might not fully agree with some of the restrictions that Blynk imposes on their subscription tiers, but I can see the business logic behind these decisions and respect their choices - based on the somewhat limited knowledge I have of Blynk’s corporate structure.
I’ll duck-out of this conversation now, as I’m sure you’ve heard more from me than you want to.
I wouldn’t hold your breath in regards to Blynk making the changes you’re hoping for, and good luck with finding a suitable alternative that meets your needs.
Маркетинговая политика Blynk - странная. Нельзя было так резко завинчивать гайки простым любителям. Тем более есть куча способов как повысить количество потоков и на бесплатном тарифе, и Blynk за это не получает не копейки.
(thanks to Google translate for helping me understand Russian! I feel very bi-lingual now)
Agree, their marketing approach is strange.
@PeteKnight, you have explained a couple of times how those data-transmission bandwidth expenses are behind the decision to essentially abandon the hobbyist market. I could believe that. So get rid of them. One possibility, among many, would be to migrate the current widgets to ride on top of an MQTT data transmission layer, instead of the (apparently expensive) current proprietary data transmission layer. Then bundle one-stop-shopping MQTT services with Blynk widgets at the subscription tier, and just the Blynk widgets at the hobbyist tier. Now your hobbyists aren’t generating bandwidth expenses that you aren’t getting paid for, and your subscription customers are paying just for the bandwidth they generate, and not subsidizing an bunch of hobbyist bandwidth free-loaders.
@Blynk, here’s some free marketing advice: The value proposition for the Blynk tools = the sexy widgets and the easy app-building environment. The value proposition is NOT the proprietary data-transmission layer that is sending data to/from components and apps. Sell what’s valuable (the widgets and easy build environment). Don’t burden it with extra costs for things that don’t differentiate the product, things that just hinder your market penetration.
Anyway, enough. I have no illusions that my lone hobbyist voice will be heard. Apparently Blynk developers are no longer participating in these forums, they seem to be just relying on people like poor @PeteKnight to carry their customer-support water. That’s unfortunate.
As for my personal needs I’m heading down the road of replacing Blynk with an app I’ll create with Android Studio, using MQTT for data transmission. The Android Studio widgets, although not as sexy as the Blynk widgets, seem to give me most of what I was wanting out of the Blynk widgets anyway.
No, I never mentioned data transmission or bandwidth costs. I think you’ve inferred that when I talked about hosting costs, but that wasn’t what I said or meant.
Most of the costs associated with hosting are down to processing power, storage and power consumption.
I think that makes your other comments somewhat irrelevant.
Бред какой-то. Самые примитивные камеры видеонаблюдения, роутеры и другая куча девайсов держат в облаке свои устройства не жалуются и годами поддерживают потоки данных. А тут мизерный поток стоит кучу баксов в месяц.
Никогда не отнимайте то что дали при старте.
Вам трудно было посчитать сразу, что 30 виджетов на устройство вам не потянуть?
Человек месяц, два разрабатывает проект тратит свое личное время за которое денег не получит никогда, а вы ему бац и запретили даже переименовать виджет.
Возможность прикупить по отдельности и одноразово нужное количество виджетов.
Можно наложить ограничения на скорость обработки потоков. Чем больше виджетов задействовано тем ниже скорость ответа сервера.
@Jon2015 this is mostly criticism, not a business model proposal.
Not everything can be planned upfront. Things change over time, it’s a core principle of nature, human life, and software development.
You don’t get paid for building projects with Blynk, Blynk doesn’t get paid by free users… I think that expectations for features availability in Free plan should be pretty low.
Renaming is not blocked, widget is blocked (you can still delete it or upgrade to PLUS to continue using the widget)
Single payments didn’t work in IoT, this is why Blynk 1.0 was closed, so let’s not get back to this discussion.
Reducing communication speed is an interesting idea though. Would such a limitation make you upgrade for a PLUS plan?
Subscription fees are a deal breaker for hobbyists.
However, hobbyists are willing to pay reasonable one-time fees to purchase a license to use widgets or datastreams.
If you can figure a way to sell widget licenses without also incurring future costs, then I think you can tap that hobbyist market to increase your revenues. The beauty of that model is the marginal cost for additional sales is near zero, meaning whatever price you charge is nearly pure profit. It would be a low volume but high margin revenue stream.
However, apparently Blynk incurs recurring costs of some nature when widgets are used? In that case what would be needed would be to redesign the widgets to shift those costs from Blynk to the user. What is the basic nature of those recurring costs? If data transmission / bandwidth, one possible idea would be MQTT.
Когда идет отладка устройства требуется контролировать много параметров и не известно будет это устройство применяться или нет. Вот на этот экспериментальный период и хотелось бы иметь полный пакет возможностей Blynk.
Когда устройство готово, то его можно урезать по количеству потоков и перевести на платную подписку. Совсем не обязательно PLUS, я готов платить и за MINI допустим на 10 потоков, если цена будут в три раза ниже чем PLUS. То есть в начале все бесплатно, а потом выбираешь подписку на свой вкус. Подписки должны быть и дешевые и под полный фарш.
Вообщем подход такой же как на выставке автомобилей. Вначале видишь будущий прототип, а покупаешь урезанную серийную модель.
I have a PLUS subscription, but I found myself in difficulty because I had to combine individual cards and tokens. I don’t care to see if a card is connected or not, however I find a way to do it with a kind of watchdog so don’t tell me that the reason is just to verify that the card is connected.
I would prefer to have a flexible plan, for example the PLUS gives you the possibility to have 80 widgets on 10 boards, because the plan can’t be dynamic so for example having max 800 widgets that can be distributed in max 10 boards? This way I could have 5 boards with 160widgets.
Or I would prefer to have max10 boards with the same token, obviously at the expense of verifying that the board is online
I’d like to be able to make sure that some users can view or control only a part of the widgets in a dashboard.
My idea is to have bundle of widget or a basket, to which users can add only required widget and pay a one time fee. Just like we fill up out online shopping cart. (Subscription would be hard, because there n number of combinations/possibilities)
I am suggesting this because, few need more devices with only couple of widgets and data streams. But few may need 1-2 devices with lot of data streams. I think you guys got the point that i am trying to make.
So with this flexible plan, one can choose what their needs are and pay only for that. This way, users and Blynk both have a win win situation.
Users get what they need, Blynk get !!
But the addition of new devices with 5$ in the free plan should not have been removed. I know that did not generate much revenue, but also it did no harm. You guys could have just left it as it is. That would have been a brilliant.
In English we have a saying that “you’re flogging a dead horse” - which means that no matter how many times you keep trying to do the same thing, it’s ultimately waste of time.
Pavel has already said…
Going back to one-off payments rather than subscriptions just isn’t going to happen. It’s time to move-on from that idea.
!!