Great idea of a product. Really mean that. I like it.
But my concern is that if Electric Imp goes out of business, then all deployed devices become effectively useless, dont they?
You aren’t going to keep your cloud servers working after you have ceased trading!
Somebody else will, I suppose
OK. But will they do it for free?
What if they don’t?
Then, the impee that you sold now starts to cost you money. Sooner or later you spend any profit that you made.
What then?
I really don’t think they have any plans to abandon their business and leave it to die
I agree it is a very important question. Almost the worst case is some new entity arrives and picks some $$ fee to keep the devices online or re-activate them. I don’t mind paying for service but paying twice would be a bummer.
Lets hope that someday they are too big to fail.
We, the couple of thousand developers and hobbiests are not the target of the Imp people, we cost them money.
@saraton The misunderstanding here is that the imp service is free for commercial use; that is not the case. It’s free for developers/hobbyists, and always will be - that’s where the best new product ideas come from, and we’re all makers here.
People making and shipping imps in commercial products are paying us for service. The main difference between the two is integration - if you use our blinkup app and the planner/IDE, and build (or copy and paste) your code, you’re a developer. If you want to make a few of something and have your customers create developer accounts, cut and paste your code into the IDE, and hook things up themselves then we’re just fine with that - it’s free.
If you’re a consumer who buys an imp-powered product and downloads a branded app from the vendor to configure and operate the device, then the device is a commercial one and somebody is paying for service.
For huge customers, we have options to reassure them about the longevity of the service. We believe that in the long term, that’ll become a non-issue.
Understood, and thanks for your answer.
Where are the details of the commercial use charges please?
And what are the options for the reassurances of longevity?
For more details, contact sales@electricimp.com.