I have been planning to add several devices to my project for the last few months based on the Maker device count expansion from 10 to 20.
Now I am very surprised to find that the plan has disappeared…
And most importantly: I have not seen any advance notices anywhere that such changes are planned…
Is this considered normal in Blynk?
2 Likes
This should not be a difficult question to answer (Blynk) - so what gives? What happens to existing paid subscribers?
2 Likes
Hi Serg_Grn, thanks for your feedback.
To clarify, if you are an existing paying user, your plan remains unaffected—protecting our customers is always a priority for us.
Currently, the Maker plan isn’t available as part of our pricing optimization process. We’ll communicate any final decisions once the testing is complete.
Thank you for your understanding!
Blynk Team
I thought that such changes should be notified in advance…
There have been more than one complaint about Blynk’s unpredictable behavior.
You never know what to expect tomorrow and whether the tariff and conditions you signed up for today will be relevant tomorrow.
I think that this certainly does not contribute to increasing the trust and confidence of customers in Blynk.
2 Likes
As we mentioned earlier, nothing changes for customers on paid plans. Even if these plans are no longer available to new users, existing subscribers can continue using them without interruption.
However, the free tier is subject to change at any time. Since it’s designed purely for exploration, not for running live projects, adjustments to the free tier are both natural and expected.
This is not true. I planned to increase the number of devices, which was provided for in the Maker plan (up to 20).
Now it is completely unclear what to do, since 10 devices are already working, and there is no way to add more.
And the PRO plan is absolutely unrealistic in terms of cost.
If you had warned me about these changes in advance, I would not have planned a system that I will not be able to implement now.
2 Likes
Hello @Serg_Grn. I guess you have Android mobile annually subscription in this Maker 10 acc. And your subscription will end in April next year.
Plan maker 20 was only available on the web console. In any case, it would be difficult to transfer from a mobile subscription to a web subscription.
Sorry, but as it was already described above, unfortunately the maker plan is not available at the moment.
The most important question: will I be able to renew my subscription for another year in April or not? Or will all my 10 devices just turn off in April, without the possibility of recovery?
I didn’t know there were any differences in subscription functionality between the app and the web console… Is this reflected somewhere in the documentation?
Don’t worry, you will be able to renew your subscription. The main thing is to pay for this subscription on time. Please don’t miss payments.
This is in the warning popups/tabs on the platform. For example, if you have a mobile subscription and you want to renew/cancel via the web console, you will see warning tabs/popups.
Different payment systems. Mobile Goggle Play subscription/payment system does not know anything about Web Stripe subscription/payment system. And each payment system has its own specifics.
1 Like
Thank you.
A small clarification: the subscription was annual, will it remain annual?
yes
1 Like
@growaquafresh1 You’ve posted about the same thing here, and in two different topics you’ve created.
Doing that makes if extremely difficult for Blynk staff to see all of the information about your issue/question in its entirety, and it gets messy when they reply.
It would seem that, instead of continuing with your existing Maker subscription, you’ve cancelled that and will now have to use the Free subscription or the much more expensive Pro subscription.
If you were happy with your old Maker subscription then it would have been best to keep that going, but now it’s cancelled you have fewer choices.
Pete.
Thank you for understanding, Pete. But I didn’t cancelled it and yes I’m in quite a challenging situation right now. I’ve installed a setup that’s roughly 2,300 kilometers away from me, and with the festival season here, it adds to the complexity of managing things from afar. Pro subscription is too much for me right now because I am adding 1-2 devices only per month and recently unpredictable changes is putting my small business in risk .
Your support and patience mean a lot during this time.
I would also have had a notification of some sort that this was going to happen!
I cancelled my subscription in August because I was going to make some more devices, but until they were ready I cancelled it temporarily.
Now they are ready but to my big disappointment the maker plan was removed!
- Is there no way to renew my subscription???
- Is Maker Plan going to be permanently gone???
Thanks for sharing what you’re dealing with—I totally get that managing things from a distance, especially during busy seasons, can be really tough. Just a quick note, though: the Maker plan is really meant for personal projects only, as outlined in our terms. When it’s used for business purposes, it can lead to some hiccups due to the plan changes, which is why the Pro plan exists to better support those needs.
I’d suggest considering the Pro plan for a smoother experience with business setups—it’s designed for exactly this kind of situation. Thanks for your understanding!
I dont understand how can you expect for people to like and develop on your platform when you have such a big discrepency between plans. Free plan is very limited, and PRO is overkill for most people and is crazy expensive. I have 10-20 devices that manage lighting and few machine in a sailing club marina. Now if you discontinue maker plan I would be forced to either leave your platform or pay almost 1200e a year which is absolutely not happening. For 1200e a year I can pay someone to sit and flip lights on and off.
Such a shame that with these moves you show clear carelessness towards makers who more than likely generate decent part of your business income.
Please consider this and make plans so they are more gradual rather than having only two very distant plans such as 0$/month and 99$/month.
@Pavlo @PeteKnight
2 Likes
My opinion - the issue is with smaller commercial projects running under the disguise of a hobby account to avoid paying for the Pro account. Enough of them doing this eats up Blynk server resources and basically is stealing away rightful revenues for Blynks hard work. Blynks dilemma is coming up with a plan that’s still useful for hobbyists and drives or controls commercial users to plans designated with sanctioned terms of use agreements.
Thinking out loud here - if Blynk licensed the old Blynk 1.0 to non profit educational entity(s) they may be able to solve this Maker vs Pro user diversification problem? Of course, you’d need to have support for that platform, billing, user app software maintenance, etc - so by no means a clean thing to undertake.
I agree that this is most likely why Blynk have scrapped new Maker sign-ups.
Take @nmarbm’s example of a marina. This clearly isn’t a personal project, and as I would assume that the sailing club has a membership subscription, mooring fees etc, it could be argued that this is commercial, and outside the scope of the Maker terms and conditions.
That’s not going to work. Blynk would have to invest so much time, effort and legal resources to police this that scrapping the Maker plan altogether is a far more sensible approach.
Once again, it’s not going to happen. Blynk Legacy was an open door for people to set-up their own server and use it commercially. Taking the apps out of the App store/Play store was the only way to stop people doing this, and re-publishing them would make no sense.
Even more unappealing for Blynk would be the prospect of having to maintain two different systems that are no so diverse that there is no commonalty between them. And what would Blynk gain from this? The answer would be nothing, it would just cost them money to maintain, lose them money in lost Blynk IoT sales, and generate virtually zero revenue in return.
As I see it, Blynk has two options:
- scrap the Maker plan and charge business prices to business users
- have a functional Maker plan and accept that this will be used incorrectly, and cost them money in the long run (in terms of server resources etc).
It seems that they’ve gone for option 1
The thing I have a problem with is the free plan with lots of functionality (users, devices, widgets etc) but the highly restrictive message limits. This is already causing issues as far as this forum is concerned, because people see this and build their projects, then run out of message allowance. The effort they put into getting their code and dashboards working is immediately wasted when they realise that the free plan doesn’t work for them in the long term, and they clearly aren’t going to pas €99 per month for a Pro plan.
It would be better to have either a fixed duration (maybe 1 month) trial, or an invitation process where potential Pro users are given short-term access to a trial system that allows them to evaluate and try before they buy.
Either way you look at it, it’s a sad situation for the maker community.
Pete.