First of all, I’m new to Ubidots, coming from another cloud service for a professional/commercial application. I’m very pleased with what I’ve been able to do. That being said, I’m also trying to use a personal account for some around the house personal needs. Although STEM is an option, I’d like to see a lower cost paid version that offers very limited, full-service, capabilities for something like $10/month. STEM is too limited for me and I’m not willing to pay $50/month for the IoT Entrepreneur version.
Here’s what I’d like (roughly):
Strictly limited to Non-commercial, personal usage
The full functionality of the industrial platform
5+ devices
~5 dashboards
1,000,000 dots per month - overage fees apply
50 free SMS (although I almost always use email)
Email free for about 100 messages
All for $10/month
Again, this would make the platform far more adequate for more demanding personal needs for those willing to pay a modest amount. I’m guessing you might get some STEM users to upgrade this this account type.
Hey @ctmorrison, glad to hear you’re finding Ubidots useful. From a maker to another, I can see the case of an extended STEM service for personal use. Let me provide more background as to why we designed the STEM plan as is, and share some thoughts on how we see its evolution.
In our former platform, Ubidots for Education, we provided only 1 device for free, with the ability to scale to more devices at a small cost per month. With time, we started seeing some users utilizing it for commercial purposes, even though the product was restricted to personal, educational use.
I know it’s hard to enforce the non-commercial policy, but such extended use forced us to design the renewed version, Ubidots STEM, with a hard stop of 3 devices per account. That is 3x the free allowance, but with a hard limit. This is helping us ensure a higher adoption in schools and universities, preserve the uptime and health of the shared infrastructure, while funneling any commercial efforts to our standard licenses.
Where do we see Ubidots STEM going?
We’re very happy to see each and every new maker project, science fair winner, academic paper or IoT training made possible by Ubidots STEM. It reinforces our mission to make IoT more accessible for all. Right now there are only 3 overages possible in STEM:
SMS alerts
Email alerts
Voice calls
In the future, we plan to gradually enable overages for:
Devices (your feedback confirms this need)
Dashboards
Dots
Data plugins (a new module we’re working on, which will have some free and some paid plugins)
The timing and limit to these overages is yet to be defined based on this and more feedback. In the meantime, I thank you for your comments and look forward to seeing what you build!
I’m with @ctmorrison - I’m a hobbiest, but I need more than STEM account provides (no surprise, eh?). I simply cannot justify $600 a year for this (or whatever a commercial account costs now). When I signed up you had something in-between, but now you’ve dropped me to a STEM account, and it’s just not enough.
Please, please, please give us something in the middle ground. Arduino IOT is less than $100/year. Particle runs a bit more than that. I’ve been with Ubidots since just about the start, and I really don’t want to look elsewhere.
Hi there, thanks for your comments and feedback. I have just shared both of them with our PM in order to make available to him additional valuable inputs for the incoming decisions about our stem plan.