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Comment by phlowbieuq | Hacker News Reader

As of now, Amazon appears to still be selling their "IOT button" (which is basically a programmable dash button)

https://aws.amazon.com/iotbutton/

The $15 "1st Generation AWS IoT Button" is out of stock, but the $20 "AWS IoT Enterprise Button" is still in stock. Is there a difference besides the label?

AWS IoT Enterprise Button creates a JIRA ticket and sends approval requests as well. /s

This is the first thing I’ve ever upvoted on Hacker News

Usually the Enterprise version is twice as big, 100x the price and 1/4 as reliable.

Better support though.

1) Double the lifetime clicks (2000 vs 1000) 2) More tightly integrated with the AWS IoT 1-Click service. (so arguably more restricted, but actually easier to manage and scale if you're an actual enterprise managing thousands of these in the field, rather than one developer building a toy app)

The AWS IoT Button is for the AWS IoT Button service ("Cloud Programmable Dash Button"): https://aws.amazon.com/iotbutton/

The AWS IoT Enterprise Button is for the AWS IoT 1-Click service ("Trigger AWS Lambda functions from simple devices"): https://aws.amazon.com/iot-1-click/

Notice how the Enterprise button listing (https://www.amazon.com/dp/B075FPHHGG) says "This is not the AWS IoT Developer Button" with a link to the other button.

The first gen ones are able to speak MQTT as well as integrate with AWS IoT core, so they could also fire off lambdas, hit SQS, etc.

The new ones are strictly worse, only able to be bound to a Lambda

Yes, but at $19.99 it's pretty expensive. I don't know what the right price point for something like this but, given the fact they are easily lost, definitely < $5, more like $1.

HW people on HN, is this impossible at scale?

$5: probably doable. An esp8266 dev board goes for $2 on AliExpress. That leaves $1 for plastics and $2 for a lipo battery.

If you wanted to make it for yourself. A general rule of thumb I've heard several times for makers is to retail at 4x the cost of goods sold - else your business is unsustainable. So for a 5$ retail price you'd have to be somewhere near $1.25 COGS. Going the otherway - 19.99 for a 5$ COGS is perfect.

If you're talking price point $5 would be $0 profit by that bill of items.

Was the original/intended purpose to always sell them at cost and make the profits up through increased sales?

"We lose a little money on every customer, but we make it up on volume." :-)

I think in Amazon's case it was just experimentation with a sunk cost. Based on the discussion above it looks like it's impossible to form a company to sell these to turn a profit, at least in the dash button form.

The original purpose of the “hackable” button was to give a fun piece of experimentation kit that worked with AWS and encouraged people to try it out. I set up my AWS account just to use one.

> If you're talking price point $5 would be $0 profit by that bill of items.

negative profit when you count assembly.

Being tangentially involved in this project it was my understanding that the devices were financed in large part by the marketing departments of the brands that had buttons, which is why they were tied to brands.

That's zero margin for Amazon though and no budget for assembly. If the materials cost is $5 then $10 is the absolute lowest you could probably hope for. $15 is a more sustainable (profit generating) product.

The actual dash buttons (including the IoT ones) don't use lipo batteries, they use a primary cell. So you can probably shave a bit off there.

That's interesting... But does Amazon provide a public API for making purchases?

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