Originally published at: Device Management Should Be Free - Golioth
Today, we’re excited to roll out a major update to Golioth’s pricing. We are transitioning from per-device per-month fees to a usage-based model. This change allows individual developers to use Golioth’s device management features for free, with no limit on the number of devices connected, and significantly broadens accessibility for teams using our platform across a diverse array of IoT use cases. By doing so, we reinforce our belief that critical device management features, like Over-the-Air (OTA) updates, are a basic right for IoT developers and a necessity for creating secure products. Introducing Our New Pricing Structure Golioth’s new pricing model is designed to meet the varied requirements of our users, from individual developers to large enterprises: Individual Developer Plan: Free Teams Plan: $299/mo (user management and support) Enterprise Plan: starting at $2,799/mo (features like SSO and private deployments) This new model provides 1GB of OTA downloads and 200MB of log messages per month for free, sufficient for managing a moderately sized fleet in production, with no fees for device connections across all plans. For those who need more, additional usage is $0.35/MB for OTA downloads and $0.20/MB for logging. We continue to offer data ingestion and routing, with data streamed through Golioth at $1/GB to LightDB Stream and $0.40/MB for data streamed out to third-party services. Our new pricing model is designed to support developers at every stage of their journey, ensuring that Golioth remains the most accessible and developer-friendly IoT platform on the market. Aligning Pricing with Device Behavior Our updated pricing model is designed to accommodate the diverse behavior profiles of IoT devices. This is particularly advantageous for “sleepy devices” — those that wake up periodically to…
Hi Dylan,
Do you have plans to provide transparency on usage and invoiced cost? Currently the Usage table accessible from Settings → Usage does not include units and it does not break out the different usage types, so there is no way to correlate device usage with cost.
For example, with the new pricing, I have been told that I owe $12 for March usage for a single development device with logging and OTA enabled. Looking at the graph below, I am not sure what is responsible for the extra charges and there are no device logs available since it was more than 14 days ago, so I cannot even speculate as to the reason.
Whilst the $12/month is inconsequential for development, if I had 10,000 devices in the field based upon a cost of $0.83/month per device for a total of $8,333 and received a bill for $12/month per device for a total of $120,000 this would be a much different discussion.
Hey @EricNRS just sent you an email on your bill that should clarify the error on my part; TLDR your usage has not yet exceeded any of our free limits and you will not be receiving a bill! Apologies for the confusion there!
On the topic of understanding your usage from the Golioth Console. If you hover over any of the bars on the chart from your screenshot you should see the exact value and data set being charted. Give that a try and let us know if those data points were helpful 
Hi Brian,
Thanks for the reply. Hovering over the usage does indeed show additional details and shows the larger usage was due to OTA updates.
I had issues where the March 19 roll-out didn’t take, from the usage it looks like the device tried repeatedly since the usage was 22 MB and the firmware image is only 1.7MB. I think I need to build in some checks there where the same firmware image is never retried more than once to avoid unnecessary bandwidth usage.
With the pricing changes, the risk of failures causing high costs has shifted from Golioth to the customer, so we will definitely need some tools to avoid surprises (which should also help Golioth with their server sizing).
Are you able to add some usage limits, warnings, and notifications to the roadmap to help users catch and fix these issues earlier? Ideally, device limits could be added to limit OTA usage and log file usage such that devices could be told to “stop upgrading” or “stop spamming logs” automatically if the device limits are exceeded.
Regards,
Eric
Hey Eric!
This is great feedback and good ideas! We’ve got a couple things in the works around better visibility into usage (so you can see the full picture at once) in addition features that should help prevent surprises.
I’ll keep you updated as we make progress in these areas. The feedback is super appreciated thank you!
Dylan
Thanks Dylan. Please share details and a timeline once they are available.
Regards,
Eric