I saw the new blynk 2.0 IoT platform and I am really impressed with its usage. Hence I would like to use it in my startup.
But the problem is there is Limited number of user that I can add, even in the Paid Plans. As, I am from India, with ₹4300 per month we can add only 20 users I guess. But being a startup we need unlimited users as we will be selling our IoT products and we don’t have idea about how many devices we will be selling. So we need unlimited users. How can I get that?
Moreover if we sell readymade products with any third party site like Amazon, we would probably not be getting their email id to invite them. There should be some way to add user without email id.
Now, I invited a user and there, my email id is being displayed in owner of the device. How can we show the email of the customer in Device Owner section? And the plan is also being displayed. Those informations should not be displayed to the customer. How can I hide these from the User?
Right now the there are 3 PRO plans. For 20 users, for 100 users, and for 500 users. At the moment that’s the maximum. If you need more I would recommend you to consider a White Label plan that doesn’t have any users limit. In reality, you won’t grow rapidly, so you’ll have enough time to switch between the plans.
In general, the goal of Blynk 2.0 is to help you start growing your business asap.
So you start with the prototype and PLUS plan with 10 users. Your business grows… Now you can switch to larger plan PRO 20, PRO 100, or PRO 500.
If you need more than that - your business is successful and I think you can afford the white label plan. that doesn’t have any user limit at all.
We’ll introduce “Template Publishing” soon. With this feature, every developer can publish it’s own template so it’s become available for every newly registered user. In other words, users without an invite will be able to see your template and provision the device without you.
Wow… I am really amazed to hear that you are working on “Template Publishing”, hope you will succeed in it and provide us with this very essential feature.
But once a “Template Publish” option is available and suppose 100 users joined me, then it will be very tedious task to transfer the ownership of each and every user, better it should automatically adapt with the signed in email id of user.
Finally I have one more query. May be a lame one but still I am asking… Suppose I sold 500 products in a particular month, As I have to Pay In Monthly basis and if No device is sold in the succeeding months, it will be very difficult to pay for the upcoming months and if I am unable to pay in a particular month will all the 500 users stop working?
If Yes, I request you to kindly bring some one time payment plan. I mean Like the same you have for device, that if I want to add a device I will pay the amount. Similarly, for each user we will pay a fixed one time amount.
Doing this will be a great help to small startups like us.
I think you need to change your business model, so that either the retail price covers your ongoing users pack subscription cost for the expected life of the device, or the customer pays a monthly subscription to cover your subscription costs.
This question has already been asked and answered before…
Every user who provisions a device becomes an owner. So you don’t need to do that.
You need to include the cloud price into your offering. Either end users should pay per device or you need to charge them with some year/month price for the maintenance.
For example, you made a device that costs 50$. You want this device to work for 3 years, so you guarantee that for your client. You’ll need to include an additional ~30$ into the price of the device as one-time fee. And the larger fleet you have the cheaper price will be.
Hey… After you confirmed yesterday that Blynk 2.0 will work as we expect, I talked with my team about the subscription. We are ready to subscribe and start with the cheapest Plan of 20 User. But, the problem lies with the higher Plans. Like there is not much option. The problem they pointed out is also genuine from their point of view.
Suppose we started with 20 User plan. We managed to get 20 User. And we also Managed to get 10 More Customer. So, Now we have a total of 30 Users. In that case we have to opt for the 100 user plan. Right…!
And if yes… There lies the problem. We have to pay for almost 3 times more users. It is not feasible for us to do so. And it’s not fair even.
And going from 100 to 500 is even more unfeasible. Paying for 500 users when we are having 110 or so users is quite difficult for such a Startup like us.
You can tell that charge from the 30 for the remaining 70. But then why would people go with us there’s other who will be providing the same thing as us at cheaper rate.
Can’t there be anything like pay as you go. So, we will be paying a monthly fees for exactly those number of user which we have. Like we will be paying for 30 users only if we have 30 customers with us…? Don’t you think that’s more fair?
Okay… So we will starting with the 20 user plan right from the day the “Template Publishing” Features come live and the app works as expected (as shown in the video).
The user seats we were discussing, are only relevant to your org and sub-orgs.
When Publishing is released, any Blynk user will be able to add your published device.
You don’t need to pay for those users!
Use your user seats for your staff / lab / etc., in this case.
Note: There will be a one-time payment associated with each device, but it also comes with some interesting guarantee from Blynk
It’s a long time and our product is ready to launch. The only thing we are waiting is for “Template Publishing” feature, so that our user can automatically connect to the Device by their own.
Hence, it is one of the most important part for our product to be ready. May we know by when the feature will be ready for us to use?
