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.