I started out very interested. I tried the particle photon when it first came out years ago, and this feels like a spiritual successor, somewhat. Good demo video.

Various thoughts:

1. Consider defining best practices for solar and selling harder around that. I've got enough use for the board in hardwired environments, and can otherwise solve outdoor power issues, but having a recommended solution that I can trust to be solid would go a long way. "Using panel of X strength and battery of X capacity, get performance Y in Z conditions", etc.

2. I would probably preorder some of these, except the pricing is omitted. I have no idea how much these would cost. If they're 5 bucks, I buy a bucket. If they're 30, I buy a handful. If they're 100, I probably skip it. Etc. Withholding the price is a red flag, and I wouldn't share my email with an org that saw fit to withhold this info as the opening act. (edit: looks like the S1 is $55, so presumably this is more)

3. The LLM/agent aspect has no appeal. Assuming those costs are passed on to me / baked into every unit, the inclusion of AI is strictly downside.

4. It's not clear whether there are ongoing SaaS/storage/subscription costs associated with this, or what they would be. The FAQ suggests that forwarding data outside of the cloud will be restricted to enterprise-scale customers. This is also a red flag.

I think this can be successful in spite of all that. Particle definitely leaned away from hobbyists and into the larger ag-IOT market early on, presumably following money and stability. Totally understandable.

I guess my overall feedback is this: be upfront about the pricing and restrictions in a way that lets guys like me filter ourselves out upfront, instead of getting our hopes up. I've got a maker-tier budget, value data freedom, and am subscription-averse. It took me quite a bit of time and digging to uncover all the details in this comment, and I wish I hadn't spent the time. There are a ton of customers who are going to be totally cool with a $60+ board and a *0,000/mo contract for data forwarding. Court them directly.

Of course, I'd love to be wrong. If this is a $30 board with nearly-at-cost cloud storage and no REST data forwarding but yes bulk JSON download, then whoa, fuck yeah. Shout that from the rooftops too.

Either way, disambiguation would help.

Completely understand. This is really good feedback. I can start off by saying that there will absolutely be a free tier within the platform where you can buy a board and that’ll include some amount of data allowance per month. It’ll also include some amount of AI usage too (even if that’s not so relevant for your application)

We’re modelling the hardware pricing such that the cost of the AI isn’t baked into the board cost. I understand that for some users, they might not necessarily need these features and it makes no sense for them to have to pay for it.

I’m expecting that we can have the boards competitively priced around the ~$70 mark, but often the distributors will try to price it in line with similar products they carry. I didn’t want to mention it in the video as we’re still negotiating this with them.

Going up from there, the subscription pricing will be split into several tiers that allow for higher data usage, AI usage and the ability to connect higher numbers of boards to one deployment.

It’s interesting that you mentioned that you’d like the data forwarding as a base feature. Our initial thoughts around that was to fulfil the requirement for companies who need to own their data. Ie we can’t store it for them. To be clear, you’ll still have access to the data via an API even in the free tier, and you’ll also be able to send data to devices via a REST API. It was just the live data forwarding from devices to your server that was intended to be limited to companies