There’s a difference between needing to check the temperature and humidity very frequently, and reporting those results to Blynk.
If your code is written sensibly then you can run a monitoring and control loop at whatever frequency you want - provided your sensors can keep up - but you don’t need to report the results at the same frequency.
You could report the readings far less frequently, or move to an exception reporting situation where you only report the situations where the temperature and/or humidity drifty outside certain parameters.
This is understandable and logical. The free plan should not be used in real long-term projects - it’s wrong.
But I can’t understand the logic that Blynk follows when it deletes the Maker plan.
Obviously, there are many developers who are ready to use the Maker plan (or similar) and steadily bring income to the company. Let the amount be small, but it is stable, and increases with the number of accounts.
And the longer Blynk adheres to the same stable behavior strategy, the more trust it has from users and the prospect of adding new ones.
Isn’t that so?
On the other hand, it is obvious that all these people will never switch to the Pro plan, because it is unrealistically expensive - it is simply impossible.
Can you explain to me and other Blynk users what is the logic of your actions?
Because such unpredictable and strange (for me) behavior is scary, you never know what to expect, because you do not understand the meaning of the actions…
It would be far better to have the Free plan as a time-limited account which either needs to be upgraded to a paid Maker or Pro account at the end of the trial period, or will be automatically deleted.
In theory people could abuse this by repeatedly signing-up for another free trial with a different email address, but as there is no way to export templates, datastreams and devices then re-import them into your new account, this approach would be impractical.
I suspect that the real issue is that people are using the Maker account for situations where they should really have a Pro subscription, but I expect that this is only a small minority of users because of the way that user accounts have been restricted in the Maker plan.
It’s a real pity that Blynk has taken this approach, and effectively abandoned the Maker community.
It’s also very sad that Blynk didn’t announce or explain any of this in advance. Blynk seem to be very good at pushing-out marketing information when new features are int5roduced, but very poor at announcing changes to existing plans. Users are left to figure the changes out for themselves, which isn’t what you’d expect from a mature software company.
The client is always ready to pay exactly for what he uses.
For example, my projects on Blynk are quite simple in terms of data volume, number of devices and users. I am sure that there are many such users.
I would gladly subscribe to Pro or another account that would cover my small requirements and have an adequate price. And I would pay for it stably, every year. And I would increase the number of projects (devices, templates) and, accordingly, the payment amount would increase.
But for this to happen, a reasonable and adequate tariff plan must be created! Flexible, allowing you to expand the system, increase the number of devices and users.
Blynk provides customers with high-quality, beautiful and extensive functionality, but does not provide adequate conditions for buying it.
My take on this change is, Blynk should remove free plan altogether.
I read a post where a Blynk staff mentioned that there are lots of new free accounts created and its putting lots of stress/load on the server. If this was the case, now people will rush towards free plan as there is no maker plan available, and put more load on the server.
My question is what is Blynk thinking? Why are they so confused?
My suggestion is,
let there be a nominal registration fee for account creation/sign up.
let there be basket where in one can choose number of templates, datastream, widgets, etc etc.
As we go on adding the above mentioned items to the basket, the subscription must be calulated.
Example : 1 template($) 25 datastream($) 10 switch($) 10 time input($) 5 led(_$)
Total (_$) - this will be the subscription cost.
This will be a win win situation for everyone.
Without a payment no one can create a account, so duplicate and spammers can be eliminated reducing unwanted load on the server.
And if Blynk is generous they can let us use the sign up fee to subscribe to wanted wigets which is worth the sign up fee.
The Maker plan had been modified to only allow 20 datastreams and at that time I believe it became not worth having. I am grandfathered into the old Maker plan and have 80 datastreams. I pay 13 dollars a month to keep that plan and have no problem doing that but I have friends that would like to have devices like mine but because of the limit that was on the new Maker plan they can’t do it. Blynk loses money because of that. Because of the constant changes that have been happening to Blynk I will not recommend it to anyone. Anytime I make a change to my devices or templates I am in fear I will do something that will cause me to loose what I have now. I had that happen when templates changed from more than 10 to 10. I had 15 at one time but had deleted some test templates only to realize the plan had changed and I could only have 10.
Does anyone know if there is a similar app available for one device and 10 data steams? I think Blynk is making a big mistake to handle large volumes of clients by making stupid expensive for new users. Someone with a great idea never learned to think big like facebook… Penny wise, pound foolish!!!
Hi Pete,
I am afraid you are correct in your assessment. I have spent the last year working on an application that can hopefully one day be a consumer product. As it stands right now, all that work has been a waste of my time. The new plans do not allow me to continue this effort - the free plan is far too restrictive and the only paid plan option is far too expensive. I’m done with Blynk and will switch to Arduino IoT effective immediately. I honestly can’t believe what Blynk has done here - this behavior is far too unpredictable to ever reengage with Blynk again. Have a nice life Blynk…
Blynk has always made it clear that the Pro product is the minimum required if you plan to use the account commercially, so loss of the Maker plan only really impacts your development process.
The same applies to Arduino Cloud, the individual plans are not for commercial use. I have no idea what a commercial plan would cost with them, because they don’t publish starting figures.
Based on the “need help…” topic that you created recently, your coding skills are a long way from being suitable for creating a commercial product, regardless of which platform you use.
Before you expend much more energy on your project, I’d do some proper business planning based on paying the real price for an IoT platform, rather than using the personal/maker versions of those platforms.
the development of a project can lead to visually observing a very large number of data in real time in order to begin to organize their processing, and to continue these observations during development to ensure that the processing is suitable. the final application will only return the processing of this data.
if the platform does not allow this observation period, it will not be chosen to validate a concept or an idea, because the developers do not have the budget for a professional plan just to validate a concept, and the large structures which have money will choose institutional IOT players for their development needs.
There are better ways to visualise data than blasting it at the Blynk server and seeing what it looks like!
I grew-up in a software development environment where code would be written and tested/flowcharted on paper before you were allocated mainframe time to enter and run your code to validate the functionality.
Using the serial monitor to track variable values and program forks/iterations is a lazy, yet effective method of visualising the results of your code development and ought to be used before “Blynkifying” code.
The only situations where large numbers of data points are really necessary is when testing how data representations look in SuperChart, and for most projects that’s just the icing on the cake.
Once the initial proof of concept is complete then it’s not unrealistic to do a one month Pro subscription to be 100% certain that the functionality meets your needs, and to explore the use of some of the Pro widgets in place of the free ones, before eventually converting to an annual subscription. If you’re paying developers and your budget doesn’t stretch to 1 month of Pro subscription then it’s unlikely that your business model is going to fly.
The biggest issue with these message limits is that it makes the product unuseable for people who want to use the free plan as a substitute for the now defunct Maker plan, for projects such as environmental monitoring.
the essence of Blynk is to have access to the device where it is placed in its operating conditions
if you have access to the serial console all along the development process then there are tons of other methods that work without Blynk or any other IoT platform, including pen and paper
Yes, of course.
When you switch from bench testing to field testing you would normally have your product 90% complete at least, so no need for this…
The issue is that Blynk has decided to adopt this stance and it has an effect on anyone who uses the Free subscription.
Blynk believe (and I happen to agree) that this is sufficient to make a decision about whether Blynk is an appropriate platform for a commercial solution in the majority of cases. For those who need more testing of specific features then they can either extend the testing period or use multiple free accounts to test various features and functionality before deciding whether to go elsewhere or bite the bullet and do a Pro subscription.
Your development path seems to be different in that you’re using the largely unsupported Python library and having development done by a 3rd party, neither of which lend themselves to an easy journey or a stable long-term commercial product. Trying to do that with a scattergun approach to data transfer whilst using the Free subscription to achieve this is only going to make your development path more difficult.
As a result, I don’t think you can describe yourself as a typical user evaluating Blynk with a view to developing a commercial product that you intend to take to market, so I’m not sure that your arguments are particularly valid when it comes to Blynk evaluating their Free versus Pro pricing and features strategy.
As a Blynk user for many years, I use python lib for historical reasons, but I’m abandoning it step by step in favor of the MQTT protocol & API requests.
Since Blynk is an agnostic platform, it’s no surprise that users and devices have multiple profiles. some of them may not reach the ears of the Blynk team if the potential user is discouraged by the offer: the first thing a user does is compare the commercial plans to select the one that suits its needs . if no one matches, the platform doesn’t even know the need exists. that’s why you only read here about this topic from long-time users, correct me if I’m wrong but I did not read any complain from potential new users about current commercial offer. We can assume that Blynk observes the commercial transformation between visit and account opening
a device sending a value per minute will be blocked in 20 days on a free plan, or in one day if you use all of the 20 allowed devices, it is a serious constraint.
For now, the user can select either a free plan which may reach the limit before it is reset, or a paid plan which he may not be able to afford.
I don’t claim to be a typical user but as a pro plan user, my request is neither to get a free plan with extended limits nor an intermediate plan, but to get a pro plan for my money since Blynk pushes to it, mainly :
stability of the platform (lack of users could lead to its degradation)
developer with access rights to templates
device analytics
more widgets & bug fixes
Either way, I will continue to use Blynk for all my projects that match what Blynk can do.
Quite a big and important topic yet no discussion or any info for days.
As someone who is currently using Maker plan and is definitely not going to go for a PRO plan because of its ridiculous pricing (and options I don’t need) Im quite sad to see this kind of information being held by.
Can someone from Blynk at least say with certainty what they decided and until what date existing Maker plan users will be supported?
Also, if there are plans on maybe introducing some intermediate plan between Free and PRO it would be great to hear it?
Those who use Maker plan probably use it for something that is not only for fun so if we need to redo our IOT infrastructure or budget for a PRO plan it would be great to hear it well in advance.
As a last hope I again urge Blynk to recognise how huge a gap is both in pricing and features between Free and PRO plans and to eventually introduce some intermediate plan.
I do understand that numbers sometime paint a clear picture on ROI and is probably the thing driving Blynk to focus on commercial users but don’t forget that community is the one who eventually drive commercial adoption of your product.
Try launching a new IOT platform with sole focus on commercial users right from the beginning…doesn’t smell like success to be honest.
I bet 9 out of 10 people recommend product they have used rather than the objectively best one.
Same applies with Blynk. If there had been no people and engineers tinkering with it, there would not have been commercial adoption on such a large scale.
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