I realise this is a community board, but hoping one of the Blues guys can clarify.
today we received a new pricing model announcement from Blues which instead of charging Consumption Credits on routed events out of notehub, from Jan 25 will be based on ingress events.
Is it planned that _session.qo events are also counted in the ingress events or only data.qo etc?
Hi @paulo,
Yes, _session.qo is also counted as the ingress event, similarly to other system events like _geolocate.qo, _log.qo and so on. We’ll provide a UI in Notehub that enables you to opt-out from us generating these events in Notehub if you wish so. Please also note that _session.qo (as well as other system events) provide quite a lot of useful information that increases an overall service value.
The rule-of-thumb here is that whenever an event appears in Notehub’s event view, it is counted as the ingress event. We are not going to count any events that are not accessible to our users.
If you have any other questions please let me know.
Marcin
Hi Marcin,
Would the UI opt out switch for “these events in notehub” be only for _session.qo or disabling other system events as well. Also would this switch in notehub be per device or entire fleet?
Obviously we need to be able to turn _session.qo back on when we need to fault find or debug individual devices, other than that we do not use _session.qo for our own telemetry.
We would still need other system events running even when _session.qo is turned off. (for example _health.qo)
I think you would need to offer individual event switching at a fleet level as well as individual device over ride switching.
We designed our system around the Blues economical constraints, SIM MB and API cost base of the existing ecosystem based on 10 years of device designed fixed cost. With Blues making these “pricing” changes it means for us Blues has effectively increase the potential cost to us by approx 6x if the future notehub switch you described is not suitable.
This change is potentially a large decrease in value offering at least in our case.
Hope the feedback is useful and Blues can accommodate.
I totally agree! For us, this new pricing model will make each data point 3x more expensive! This is not what I signed up for. I am very disappointed at this turn of events and also the sneaky way it was presented. The blurb said it was to make pricing “easier”. Mmm…
Could I please ask that the Blues hierarchy provide a fuller explanation as to why this pricing change needs to happen and why is isn’t what it looks like: i.e. a straight up money grab? If this pricing model needs to stay as is, then I’m afraid I will have to re-consider whether its worth staying with Blues.
Plus no more volume discount for credits!
Blues introduced a very nice product, but unfortunately, it has just shifted the unreliability from the hardware to the pricing model.
Hi all,
We understand your concerns regarding introduction of the new pricing model and potential consequences that it may have for your solution. At the same time, as we are maturing as a company, so is our customer base and it’s our business aim to support their growing fleets. The feedback that we have received from our customers with larger fleets was that they haven’t understood why they are supposed to pay multiple times for the same things (e.g., routing Events to their dashboards and analytics services) and how to easily project their service costs. Thus, we have come up with the new pricing plan which is based on the 2 pillars:
Regarding the Events automatically ingressed into Notehub. As mentioned in an earlier post, we will provide a UI for opting-out from having them ingressed. This option will include: _sessions.qo, _geolocate.qo, _log.qo (with GPS, MODEM and POWER trace options). In the beginning, the opt-out option will work on the whole project level. We’ll definitely look into the options of enabling the opt-out capabilities at the more fine-grained level. However, we’d also like to emphasize that the overwhelming majority of our customers appreciate value these Events bring for them in terms of debugging and improving their deployed solutions. This becomes more noticeable once their solutions grow and they encounter more edge cases in their deployments. There are similarities here to the concept of logs and system observability capabilities. These are also system components that don’t bring an obvious business value for the solution owner, however, every mature solution needs them in order to know how well your system does and where the room for improvement is.
Furthermore, Blues product is not just about routing Events. There are also other functionalities that are included in the service costs. For example, there’s a secure and highly-reliable firmware update included. All these features will grow in their prominence with the upcoming enforcement of digital product security laws (e.g., EU’s Cyber-Resilience Act). So there’s more to look into the Notehub offer and attributed service costs beyond the basic data routing capabilities.
Once again I understand that this change introduces small cost increases for you. At the same time, we think that the new pricing model is still fair for small customers and those in their early development stages. It also takes into account the perspective of our bigger customers that have already completed a part of their solution scaling journey that we want to attract as well.
Marcin, I appreciate the many words of comfort, but at the end of the day, Blues have effectively increased my data cost 3-fold. This is NOT a small increase! The extra services and features are not something that will help me and my business. Maybe this is something that will help your customers who are already “at scale”, but for the rest of us (the majority?) all you have done is charge more for the features we do use, and have based our fledgling businesses on.
The scale of the increase, the lack of consultation and very short notice are deeply troubling to me, and I suspect many of your users. I urge you to re-consider this pricing plan!
Ray,
Thank you for your feedback, we take it seriously. We have an internal discussion about it.
Hi all,
At Blues, we take our customer needs and their feedback seriously.
Given some of the feedback around aspects of our planned pricing updates, we’ve made a decision to introduce a new category of Events events called Platform Events as of January 1, 2025 and offer these free of charge to all customers.
These Events are part of _session.qo, _log.qo, _health.qo and _geolocate.qo notefiles. These events provide administrative functionality and many can be useful for debugging and support, again we are going to offer them free of charge in Notehub.
We hope that this is a welcome change, and illustrates our commitment to support our customers at every phase of their connected product journey. We are working on the more formal communication of this changes. Thanks again to those who offered input and feedback.
Marcin
That is indeed a most welcome and sensible change - thank you for listening! That makes all the difference!
Hi Marcin,
Yes thank you, that is perfect makes things a lot easier to manage.
Hey folks,
To echo, Marcin, I wanted to thank you all again for taking the time to share your feedback. Your feedback, and that of other customers has helped us better understand the impact of our planned billing changes based on the structure of certain kinds of apps, which is why we were happy to make the change that Marcin detailed yesterday. I also wanted to share two other related changes that should be helpful, moving forward:
Not only will we not be billing for incoming (ingress) Platform events, we will also not be billing for routing (egress) these events to external services. These events are now free and you are welcome (and encouraged!) to send them to your downstream cloud apps if they contain useful information for your projects.
As of today we’ve also made a small UI change in Notehub that will highlight the filename of Platform events in green, as shown in the screenshot below so it will be clear which events we are providing for free in Notehub, and which user events are consumption-bearing.
This will show Platform events starting from mid-afternoon today so don’t worry if you see previous platform events that don’t have this indication.
Thanks for betting on Blues, and for sticking with us. If there’s ever anything I can do to help you, please feel free to send me a PM here, or email me at brandon@blues.com.
