My understanding is that existing Maker subscriptions will continue as long as you keep paying the fees without any interruptions.
I think the reason for not having a plan between the Free and Pro plans is that this type of subscription was being abused, and used for semi-commercial projects. If that’s the case then I can’t see a scenario where an intermediate plan would be reintroduced.
Pete.
Quite vulnerable since billing goes through IOS AppStore subscriptions. Change in country is enough to cancel all existing subscriptions.
On the topic of abusing intermediate plan, I don’t really agree. Pro plan is an overkill and Free plan is just too restrictive.
What I advocate for is for intermediate plan to exist and be adequately sized so that its’ ROI is same as for PRO plan.
If intermediate plan offers 20% of PRO plan’s traffic it should also be around 20% of its’ price.
As a AWS cloud architect Im pretty certain that most of the load/cost boils down to MQTT messages exchanged and historical data kept. All of that is easily scalable for different plans.
As for keeping so to say static entities such as templates, users, roles, etc…cost is miniscule.
All in all, Im leaning more and more towards thinking that Blynk just realised that ROI is higher if focus is set on PRO plan users.
Im just sad that instead of trying to make a de-facto standard IoT platform with as much users as possible, Blynk decided to rather scale business such so that it has the highest ROI possible.
Sounds like shoe shop that would rather sell one 700$ shoe than sell ten 70$ shoes. 
One would say that it makes sense since OPEX is lower for less users but im pretty sure Blynk’s OPEX is mostly driven by the number of devices (MQTT messages and historical data stored) and not so much by the number of users.
Very few Blynk users are communicating with the server via MQTT.
To use your shoe shop analogy, how would you react if, as you realised that your customers were buying your $70 shoes and re-selling them for $500 ?
Blynk Legacy was built on a very different business model, with one-off purchases of functionality in the form of “energy” and the ability to install a local server if desired. Commercial customers were charged a much higher price, which effectively subsidised everyone else.
That proved unsustainable, because of the ability to share projects (similar to templates) and use a local server for business use.
The new version of Blynk has gone through a massive number of different cost model variations since it was launched, probaly in response to analysing how the various subscriptions were being used by various groups of users.
Unfortunately, Blynk has often made these changes without notifying users or explaining the rationale behind them.
It’s clear to me that too many users were using the Free plan, and I’ve always thought that it should have been a time-limited trial.
The Maker plan was a perfect balance for most people, with the possible exception of the multi-user restrictions, but clearly (to my mind at least) it was being abused by some.
You only need to look at some of the forum posts to see that people were using it for business orientated projects, and I would guess that the number of people who admitted to this were just the tip of the iceberg.
Sadly, the current free plan isn’t sufficiently powerful - in terms of organisational structure and user permissions - to allow potential business users to fully test the functionality. It’s also not very well flagged-up that there is a crippling monthly message limit, potentially luring students and makers into the product before they realise that their only option is to pay $99 per month or go elsewhere.
Given that situation, and the fact that the Pro subscription has a support desk ticketing system, this forum is effectively dead. Pro users don’t need to use it, and Free users who do are effectively time-wasters (even if they don’t yet realise it) because the product is crippled by the message limit.
Pete.
I would be very happy to see that my shoes sell well through my distributors to customers to whom I do not have access myself
The analogy is clearly wrong.
Customers do not resell the software product, but sell their product, which is supported by the Blynk software.
As for the comparison with a shoe store, the analogy is quite accurate. It is much more reliable to sell a hundred products for $10 than 10 products for $100.
But not everyone understands this.
As a result, many potential users are now wasting their time - getting to know the platform, mastering complex technical aspects, searching for answers on the forum, etc.
This is called deception and fraud.
exactly, blynk customers and blynk customers customers are not the same, blynk systems and blynk customers systems are not the same.
il you sell steel, you can’t prevent hammer factories to sell hammers more expensive than the steel they contain.
You’re all missing the point.
Every Blynk account costs Blynk money to host.
Accounts designed and sold for “personal use” shouldn’t be used for commercial purposes. But, people were clearly doing this with the Maker subscription.
If the Blynk app used in that way helps the business be more efficient then the business should either pay for a Pro subscription, or stop ripping-off Blynk by using a personal subscription for business purposes.
Of course, there’s no way to enforce that, so the simple - if rather crude - solution is to remove the Maker subscription and cripple the Free subscription so that it’s useless for anything practical.
That what Blynk seem to have decided to do, at the expense of the maker community.
That’s where we are, and it’s obviously going to lead to frustration for makers and for free users who expect to be able to throw together a school project then are shocked when it stops working because they’ve exceeded their message limit.
Neither of these should worry Blynk if reducing server costs and increasing profits are the priority (as is the case for most businesses) unless it results in a lack of Pro subscriptions in the long term.
I think we just have to accept the fact that Blynk is now out of reach of the type of person who uses this forum and deal with that.
Pete.
we do not miss anything but we have different viewing angles
As a customer, my opinion is that Blynk’s offering is clearly not scaled enough.
the missing intermediate plan cannot be reserved solely for “personal use”: it is absurd to hope to control what customers do with it.
it is the customer’s responsibility to verify that the intermediate plan meets their needs, it is Blynk’s responsibility to come up with a plan that allows them to make money.
if it is impossible for blynk to offer such a plan, that’s okay, but some features are badly missing in the pro plan for a pro usage, to be short:
Absurd behavior in Blynk is normal behavior 
Another point to be made here regarding “blynk customers customers” is that too much “Blynk-ness” shows through to end users, even with Pro plan. My end users do not need to know about Blynk promotions, news items, or the list of settings/options( like Billing!) that are present under the left-hand hamburger. And yes, I do know about the “business plan” that offers OEM logos, custom widgets, etc. , but I should be able to do most “business” functions with Pro but without the Blynk ads.
thanks for explaining. But still such30k limits seems too few. Myself just start to learn about iot, and within 3 days, when the first time I see the such limits on the dashboard, it only a few hundreds left, all consumed by test out how to use it, and with hundreds of message left, it almost can not do anything . One good thing is I start to try to learn the technique of how to reduce the message, the bad thing is new comers like me may have to try on another platform so that I can continue the learning journey. Is there some good place tutorials on effective communicate with the cloud in the iot settings? And when we would expect the limits get tune up, instead tuning down further? Is the message limit based on calendar month? And will unused message roll over to next month? This is my side hobby, and I won’t spend full time on it. So for me later on the message usage will be less at some point.
Posting multiple related questions in multiple topics isn’t the best way to use this forum.
I understand that the message limit gets reset on the anniversary of the account creation.
You can always create another free account using a different email address then continue your learning that way.
The bottom line is that your 30,000 messages gives you about 1,000 messages per day, or around 40 per hour. This allows you to update a singe datastream on a single device about once every one and a half minutes.
If that isn’t enough, and you can’t afford to pay $99 per month for a PRO subscription then Blynk probably isn’t the platform for you.
Pete.
thanks Pete, as you mentiond the limits message should have a way to be checked on the actual traffic. For me, I don’t even know where those are gone, and I am trying to reduce the active of the system blindly. When I was younger, I did apply multiple email, and at this point, I get older and tired of remember different weird name and password I have to come up for a new email. But seems it is the only thing I can do now, until the system’s limitation changes. The forum is nice to have you here. I was stuck in debugging, even with help of AI, but multiple cases AI didn’t find out the buggs, but I found direction of solutions by reading your post, LOL. May I get your suggestion on avoiding unessasary message when tunning a program? Like program tech? tricks in the blynk world?
Use BlynkTimer and don’t do more than one Blynk.virtualWrite every 90 seconds (90,000 ms).
Pete.
Thanks for your advice on timer. On the Blynk website about the timer, I see an example “Blynk.virtualWrite(Vpin, “hello”, 123, 12.34);” is it going to send three data type in a package, and string lable can grab the “hello”, and int wedge label grab 123? meaning I can use this way to reduce three messages to one message consume?
I don’t understand that example, but the best way is to do s9me test to see what the message counter shows.
Pete.
the free plan I am using don’t have the detailed message log. only show “20.6k of 30k”. Do you have advanced account to check?
Maybe if you create a new account it will show more granular data in the first few hundred messages.
Pete.
Hi, to view the number of detailed messages you have to go to the app, enable developer mode and select “billing”, you will find the detailed messages there.
Thanks! That helps, but still to have the message info like when and what was send / receive is counted would be better.