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Comment by rozzie | Hacker News Reader

You may be interested to know that the Notecard + Notecarrier-AA, without any host MCU, and with just a couple lines of JSON to configure it, act as a tracker. It has on-board GNSS plus antenna, plus an accelerometer so that it doesn't consume energy when not in motion. (It draws about 8uA when idle.)

Also, if you want to pair it with a $2 ESP32 configured with ESP-AT firmware, the built-in firmware will also do WiFi triangulation.

Yes, we have customers using it as a simple tracker. However, to be clear, this is not a complete "to the glass" tracking solution. All it does is to send tracking data to your service via HTTP JSON. If you have a system that "just wants the data", this is a perfect solution.

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I know you guys likely want to focus on being the shovel vs the gold miner, but if you were to setup a ready-to-go tracking package, You would easily take over the entire market.

The amount that insurance companies pay for services to track leased-cars, Shipping carriers wanting to track high value items, etc.. Its a massive market- and all of them are paying 3-5$/month per tracker.

You should consider making a white labeled tracker 'company' you own in house. You could charge easily, 4-5x more than you do for the product. Its also the most obvious use case for your product. You would kill it.

I agree with your prediction about the market value of low cost trackers. I've been searching for a low cost way to track things for a long time.

> if you were to setup a ready-to-go tracking package, You would easily take over the entire market.

So do it. :-)

My guess is that by the time to build that as an end-user suitable product (including stuff like enclosure, packaging/i, structions, distribution, retail channel, support, etc) and stand up the web service dashboard and write the mobile apps, unless you can go from zero to 100k units in the field immediately, you're gonna end up at similar end-user pricing. 4-5 times more for the product (which is still only a couple of hundred bucks) is a lot of years of $15 Alibaba GPS tracker with $3-5/month subscription SIMs in them.

I'd bet good money that trying to outcompete existing produce segments on price isn't going to be the unicorn success stories that are told of customers for these in 3-5 years time, it'll be people who've thought up entirely new markets and product categories that this device makes possible.

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