When to License?

How does Electric Imp define when I need to move from “Developer Edition” cards to a formal license? I built an Impee for a friend as a gift. He showed it to his other friends. Now they want one too. I’m happy to build them, but would ask for some general compensation for parts and labor. Can I continue to use the “Developer Edition” cards? Where’s the limit? Five friends? 100 friends?

I’m being somewhat generic on the topic of my Impee because I may choose to legally protect my idea and/or form a business around it. If I went that way, it would still be me creating individual units, and not (initially) offshore production runs. Does being a business mean I need to license the Electric Imp technology? Even if there are only a couple hundred, handmade, units per year? I’d appreciate any clarification on the Developer Edition terms.

The main point here is that they’re having to use the developer UI to set their devices up on their own account; this is not the “consumer flow”. Whilst engineer buyers may be fine with this, it’s not really something you could sell at retail. Hence, you’re ok sticking with developer cards for what you’re doing now.

The consumer imp license gets you the blinkup libraries, allowing you to integrate the setup flow into your own app, and avoid the whole creating a planner account, pasting code into editors, etc. Plus, you get a whole heap of management/deployment tools and statistics collection.

Given the effort involved here, what we have now may not be applicable for your volumes. We’ll be offering better solutions for smaller vendors later in 2013 as we build a self-service portal.