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No, I am talking about removing the upgrade add every time I open the blynk app.
I know putting all kinds of adds on the app will be a bad idea. -
They spoke about possible regional pricing for blynk when blynk iot were launched.
I donāt get an āupgrade addā every time I open my free app.
Pete.
I donāt think we can trust Blynk not to change everything on a whim! Itās now the second time in 2 years. Worse than Apple!
I want to support Ukraine - but not everyone in the west is a millionaire! There are loads of hobbyists using Blynk to build something cool - who just donāt have the spare cash for yet another app which has decided to force you into a paid account to keep the functionality.
Iāve mostly written a replacement for my own requirements, using MQTT + a free MQTT Server and an app built out of the free MIT App Inventor (which is awesome!). Not quite as easy to implement as Blynk - but I only have to do it once. I can freely share the app and Iām confident itās not going to suddenly all change.
Youāre just asking ordinary users to move on to something else!
Iāve been getting the upgrade popup, probably 50% of the time for the last couple of months. Originally I could just click through - but now itās causing the app to hang most of the time. Have to terminate the app, reload and click through. It possibly hangs when it times out connecting to the server?
Blynk may have been categoric about no advertising popups - but this isnāt really the same as popups in most apps (which are infuriating in many cases) showing 3rd party advertising. Just a persuader to upgrade. Wouldnāt be a big problem, if it didnāt crash!
Where are you seeing $1.99 a month?
The only options Iām offered are Ā£5.99 per month for Plus and Ā£41.99 for Pro.
For the features (at least the ones I used) in the previous version with paid for āenergyā, Iād need to spend Ā£41.99 per month (Ā£503.88 per year). Sorry, itās not worth it.
I really hate the way so much of the software I use where I thought Iād bought a perpetual licence, suddenly becomes a subscription only service. The only way to stop this is the users complaining and changing what software they use.
You didnāt read what I wrote properlyā¦
The $1.99 isnāt a Blynk pricing option, itās an Arduino Cloud pricing option, and itās what you need to pay Arduino if you want what Blynk will be offering for free after the end of the month.
Pete.
Personally I would pay $1.99 per month for 20 datastreams and to have the popup removed. The popup also give me a lot of problems. I donāt need all the of the plus features yet.
I donāt think thatās going to happen. If you want more than 10 datastreams then you need to subscribe to the Plus plan
Pete.
They can at least look at something like that. I am sure a lot of free users would move over.
Iām sure that Blynk have, and Iām also pretty sure that theyāve realised that the merchant fees that are applied when collecting small amounts of money like this on a monthly basis makes it impractical. Shifting that to an annual collection would make it more economically viable, but then make the financial outlay something that would probably deter many people.
You also have to consider the server hosting costs for Blynk. Clearly datastreams have an impact on server CPU usage and storage overheads. Given the rising costs of energy and silicon chips, Blynk need to fine a price point that works for them, otherwise they are operating at a loss with the entry-level accounts.
If thatās beyond the affordability limits of some users than thatās an issue for those users, not for Blynk, as it doesnāt make economic sense to provide a premium software service at a loss.
Pete.
Hello. Is that Android or iOS? Latest version?
Blynk constantly evolves: new features introduced every month, bugs are fixed, support is provided, more examples, docs added, etc. This year weāll focus Blynk IoT Platform development even more. Weāll finally fix some UX issues.
Someone wrote āwe are beta testersā. Thatās partially true, the other part of truth is that 90% of the bugs are caught by Blynk QA team before every release.
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Yes, of course.
But the free plan is simply a drain on both server and support resources. While you need to have a way of people trying-out the Blynk product in a ātry before you buyā scenario, there ought to be a limit to how long a free account can keep going.
Purging unused Legacy accounts from the server was always an issue, because people would post a āI canāt log-in and password recovery doesnāt workā question, which often resulted in them being unhappy because their project had been deleted because they hadnāt logged-in for so long.
I donāt know what system you have for purging unused free accounts, but there must already be thousands that have been abandoned. This problem would go away if free accounts had a limited life and auto-deleted (after sending the user multiple warnings and offers of an upgrade to convert into a paid account).
But the paid accounts need to pitched at a price point that at the very least covers your costs, including collection costs, hosting costs and tax liabilities and has some margin built-in to contribute towards your admin costs.
Youāll never get the entry-level customers to make a significant contribution towards your staff costs, but at least you shouldnāt be making a loss.
At the moment the free user accounts are potentially a bottomless pit of corporate expenditure for you, as there are an infinite number of potential sign-ups, and no limit on how long those accounts can be used for if they are used on a regular basis. I donāt see how that makes financial sense, as the benefits of āfree beta testersā and āpotential future paying customersā donāt add-up in practice.
Pete.
Or a try before you buy and the add a cheaper option in the place of the free option that is the same as what the old free plan was. That will give some more certainty for those of us that donāt need the plus plan but need something reliable that wont suddenly change. I donāt know, I am just putting something out there. I donāt even know if I make sense.
The point Iām making is that the price point of this āintermediateā plan might not be as cheap as you think.
When you factor-in the costs and overheads I mentioned in my previous post it might not be much cheaper than the current Plus plan.
Only Blynk will know what these costs are, but Iām pretty sure that it wonāt be as cheap as many are hoping, so may not be worth the hassle of implementing.
Pete.
Android V1.7.6(109) from 24/1/2023
There are some people who are happy to continually tinker with, change & upgrade the projects theyāve built. For them, changes like this, or the last big change from the ālegacyā to current versions isnāt a problem.
For me at least, Iād like to build / write a project and it continue to work until I decide to change it - not have to jump at someone elses call.
I donāt mind paying for services - but what I want out of that service is stability. I paid for energy in the legacy version only a couple of months before it was retired and I lost it.
I changed all the software on devices for the new version, and optimised it for the free version - figuring Iād already paid once and the jump in price was too high. Once again, now I have to re-write everything or pay. Unfortunately, I cannot trust that this is not going to happen all over again! Even if I decide to pay for the āplusā subscription - Iām probably, based of experience so far, going to have to re-write when version 3 comes along, or you decide the āplus versionā can only have 1 device & 2 datastreams - and try to lever everyone into upgrading again.
The new version is clearly aimed at corporate customers & business users. Unfortunately, this feels too common. Release a product for āmakersā & hobbyists then, when it becomes popular, the bugs have been fixed and they have a corporate user base, dump the āmakersā as being too expensive and concentrate on business users who can pay. Blynk, like all the others, owes their success to the adoption by hobbyists - and I feel weāre just being used!
In the middle of a cost of living crisis - I canāt justify additional spend on something which is nice to have but not essential.
Iām sure Peter King, the arch Blynk defender will be along to tell me how wrong I am on all of this. If you have the cash & time to spend on this - Iām very happy for you, but donāt just rubbish everyone elses opinion (you do seem to be in a minority) who isnāt in your position!
I donāt expect this to make a jot of difference to Blynk (or Peter) - so I think the best option is to move on to one of the alternatives.
MIT App Inventor is looking promising, using MQTT as the transport protocol is looking good at the moment. At least, once itās compiled as an app, it will continue to work.
This is to replace Blynk in my open source, webasto controller project https://github.com/SimonRafferty/Webasto-Heater---Replacement-Controller/tree/Webastardo-V3
I actually forgot I tried this in the past. I am going to revisit this. I asked ChatGPT how I can do it ad it looks quite promising. Just seems like I will need to do quite a bit of tweeking.
I think this is an unfair comment.
Pete has been critical of other aspects of Blynk, most notably the bizarre user/staff settings. You are also suffering from selection bias. Of course most people coming into the free plan change topic are going to be critical, they are people who arenāt paying anything at all to the product and now will be getting less bang for their ābuckā. The people actually paying for the service arenāt going to complain, they arenāt in this category and typically speaking, people receiving free services are the least educated on the cost of providing a service and the most likely to get angry about losing things they arenāt paying for in the first place.
There isnāt really a downside for Blynk here. If a bunch of free users leave, it frees up server and development resources for people actually contributing, reduces forum clutter for people who donāt have a grasp on things but saw the word free and at the end of the day, if you arenāt paying for a service you are not a customer. So Blynk isnāt going to lose customers, it will lose users which is an important distinction to make.
And before you accuse me of being a shill for Blynk, I have my own issues. I also donāt understand the user/staff setup, but have been told that will be rectified. My bigger issue is partially my own limitations but also a very confusing choice in my opinion from the Blynk devs to begin with. Why is basic Edgent functionality a blocking function? Itās designed to be a template to base an OTA, self provisioning IOT product but the example provided fails to function on loss of wifi. I would presume most people building a project off this would want example code that functions how one would expect an IOT product to function without having to dig into and rebuild the example code.
Anyways, Blynk isnāt perfect, but the free plan is not an issue and the fact that they provide one that you can use forever and not as a trial is pretty impressive.
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I assume thatās me youāre referring to?
From your perspective you are of course 100% correct. My perspective is as a former IT analyst, project manager, IT purchasing manager and occasional coder. I see this from both sides, and realise that no company is going to work their butts off to produce a āmakerā system which is virtually free, without also needing to balance the books by having a corporate customer base. Ultimately, it becomes the business customers who call the shots when it comes to development priorities, but should those business customers also subsidise the makers?
You know my stance on that. You get very little in this world for free or for peanuts, and technology as powerful as Blynk has to come at a cost.
In my opinion, that should be the basis for all good home automation systems, especially with Node-Red as a rules/logic engine. The decision then is what to use as your UI, and that is where Blynk wins for me, especially when you go for a paid subscription which gives the wider choice of widgets and functionality.
If you read some of my other comments youāll know that I speak my mind, and that I often criticise Blynk for their approach to some things, so Iām far from a Blynk supporter, but I am hopefully a business savvy pragmatist.
Pete.
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