Essential changes to FREE plan!

Oh, I’m sorry @vshymanskyy, my bad. :sweat_smile:

There are different views on the value/logic of free accounts.
I think it gives a lot of goodwill.
If students are allowed free access with some limitations, then they are likely both to spread the word and once in a job situation they are likely to choose this product commercially.
I am retired, but I still spread the word on how easy this is to use to potential Blynk customers from later generations…
I would like to compare with the providers of the excellent software Autodesk Fusion 360. That is a very powerful cloud-based 3D modeling, CAD, CAM, CAE, and PCB software platform for product design and manufacturing. All designs are saved in their cloud.
They have a program for students and hobbyists that gives very close to full functionality, free of charge.
I use it a lot for 3D designs.
They have some limitations that make it a bit cumbersome to use commercially, but for a hobbyist it is extremely powerful.
I am certain that the purpose of that is not to be nice, but to attract commercial users long term.
Blynk would be great for me if I could use all the widgets but still be limited to the current number of templates, devices and datastreams. Hard to see the logic behind the limitation in use of widgets. I can’t see that those eat precious server space.
I think that a good free program will benefit the company long term, but that is of course only my humble opinion.

Leif

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How will this apply to those of us you gave 5 free devices to for early adoption??

Is it 10 streams per device or just 10 streams for the free account??

As it says in the initial post…

Pete.

My stopped to work yesterday. Its Offline. However i have only 9 datastreams.

Probably unconnected then.
I’d suggest that you start a new topic, and include ALL of this info, even if you don’t think it’s necessary…

Pete.

After reading your words, it became interesting for me to do a little analysis.

I met Blynk in 2018. Since then, about 10 small projects have been made, some of them were experiments and were soon removed.
This is quite a bit.

During all this time (from 2019 to 2023), I created 9 topics on the forum dedicated to the detected errors.
In fact, it turns out that as soon as I start a new project on Blynk, I find either a bug or an oddity.
And I usually create a topic on the forum.

I can only assume that I am not the only one.

Therefore, I think your conclusions are not very objective.
I mean the answer to this question:


I understand and support the desire to make the product cost-effective.
But I think the objectivity of the assessment is a little “lame” in Blynk.

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@Serg_Grn

All these statements have very shaky base…

You chose Blynk 4+ years ago for your personal project and now even use it commercially. I can assume that you found something valuablr in our product that made you use it for so long. We never forced you to choose it, correct?

We also never forced you to report bugs. In the same manner we never forced anyone to report them.
Somehow it happened organically.

I tend to believe that it happened because other people found Blynk beneficial and valuable, and wanted platform to be better.

How come then, that some users are trying to turn things around and create a pressure that we owe them something?

As a company, we only “owe” a great product that evolves. It’s up to everyone to decide to use it or not.

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I chose your product because I liked it.
Until now, I use it because your conditions are still acceptable, although judging by the trend, this may not be for long.

Some users simply leave the platform, having not the best opinion about it.
If you think that this is normal, then this is your path.

Thanks for staying with us :pray:. So far we don’t see people leaving the platform. We see a different trend :crossed_fingers:

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My opinion is,

Instead of making frequent changes(free plan), you must decide something that will be good for the company as well as users. And that should stay that way once announced.

This way there will be no harsh/mixed opinions. Users will start to go with the flow. If there will hindrances every few days, and having to ditch their projects or modify, it’s human tendency to start reacting.

If possible, come up with an FINAL feature list for FREE PLAN and try to keep it that way for at least FEW YEARS.

I agree, but not just with the free plan, the same needs to apply to all plans.

For example, the other day an error message revealed that the number of allowable metadata fields has been reduced to 10, which includes the 4 reserved ones…

Sneaking changes like this in without even bothering to announce the change or giving people sufficient opportunity to change the way that Blynk is used isn’t good for customer confidence.

Pete.

2 Likes

I can relate Blynk to Electric vehicles.
Has good torque, speed, maintenance free, environmentally friendly… But comes with a huge CAVEAT - “Range anxiety”.

probably users are facing the same kind of anxiety. Dont know what and when is going to stop or changed. Users are still in the shock of Blynk legacy taken down :sweat_smile:

So bringing changes rapidly in quick successions will scare away people…

I think that only applies to a small number of users, who may previously have bought a small amount of energy and were effectively getting all of the legacy features for free.
The shock is that this “too good to be true” bargain system now expects users to pay a realistic amount of money each month for the features they are getting. They also seem to think that the fact they spent a few dollars on energy five years ago means that they should get a lifetime supply of Blynkiness.

These are probably the same people that still have a BetaMax video recorder and constantly complain that they can’t get blank tapes anymore.

Pete.

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:rofl:

The problem here is that we move very fast. One Blynk sprint (1 week) introduces over ~100 different changes on the platform. It’s not we’re hiding it, it just not possible to highlight every change we do. If we start highlight every change - people will end up spending a full day just to read the changes list :slight_smile:.

This particular change is considered not important, as according to our data, only few users use metafields.

But raspberry pi is not free as well! First, you would need to pay ~0.5-1$ a month for the electricity. And you would need to buy it for ~40$ one-time. Taking into account average lifespan ~6 years, it’s another 7$ per year, or ~0.5$ monthly. So you end up with another subscription of 1$ per month in the best case :slight_smile: .

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But this was just one example. There have been other changes that impose limits that weren’t previously thereand that were undocumented.

The point I’m making is that to a certain extent it doesn’t matter for free users, they are simply trying the software and should choose to upgrade to a paid plan or stop using it. The people who are paying though have chosen a plan based on its suitability for their requirements (and its affordability too). If you suddenly move the goalposts, either with or without giving notice first, you’ll have dissatisfied customers who don’t know where or when the next change will come from.
If people have developed a commercial solution based on the features that were available at the time, and have devices in the wild that will be broken by these changes then for them its not just a case of being inconvenienced, they are losing their reputation as a supplier.
Obviously one solution is to sign-up to a business subscription, but that makes the Plus/Pro plans virtually redundant for anyone except makers who are prepared to pay for a service that may be fine one week but broken the next.

I think you should look more closely at your architecture and decide what the minimums you can support are, then stick to those minimum limits. Any enhancements should be improvements to functionality that don’t result in system limits being downgraded as a result.

Pete.

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Also, anyone running a Raspberry Pi with an SD card is eventually going to have an unrecoverable failure and total loss of any OS, configuration and data that isn’t backed-up.
This happens far more frequently than people expect, even with good quality branded SD cards. The solution is an SSD storage system, and a good backup routine, which sees those costs escalating very rapidly.
Then of course if you want to have graceful shutdowns in case of power loss you need a UPS, which has an investment cost and an ongoing cost in terms of additional power consumption, replacement batteries etc.

And then the user’s time to build and maintain the system, perform backups etc, etc, etc.

Suddenly a Blynk subscription looks like good value for money :grinning:

Pete.

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Then you must definitely facing this issue as you are a fan of nodeRed. How do you manager so many stuff at once!! I would definitely not like maintaining so much stuff all at once.

I have Node-Red production servers on two sites (U.K. & Spain) and a development server on one site. All have SSDs attached, and the development server is a mirror of one of the production servers (I choose which one).
Node-Red flows are backed-up from one location to another and to the cloud.

Once everything is set-up then it basically runs itself as far as backups are concerned, and all upgrades are tested on the development server before being (manually) applied to the development servers.
ZeroTier is extremely useful when doing this stuff across multiple sites, as it gives me a private network which bridges both sites and also gives me remote access from anywhere in the world.

For me, it’s not an issue as I’ve done sys admin and server opps stuff for many years, although Linux isn’t my favourite environment to work with, I’m more of a Windows guy, but the Raspberry Pi is a nice hardware solution for this type of stuff.

Pete.

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