I still don't think the pricing makes sense for anything that doesn't have a solid plan and a sales team. If you graph the cost per device / month it'll be free for 10 users, then a huge jump when you need a paid plan, then an increasing slope until you hit the peak at $14.39 per device / month on the
Production plan, then a decreasing slope trending towards $1.00 per device / month (for essentials).
In something like the digital signage market, where IoT device management makes sense, I can buy hosted solutions that include the signage SaaS for around $10 per device / month. On Balena Pilot I'd be paying $6.50 per device / month (initially) and competing against large providers who have costs closer to $1.
The pricing page looks even worse than that at a glance. The thing I see immediately is $1439 / month for 100 devices. The plan is named Production and it's the only one where I can calculate the per device cost without thinking (divide by 100), so it gives me the expectation of $15 per device / month until I read the fine print and pull out a calculator to figure out an actual cost average based on projections.
My gut reaction after spending 5 minutes on the pricing page is that I would need to get into the range of 500 devices before I could be cost competitive unless I'm in a specialized market where I can justify charging a really large monthly fee per device.
A hobbyist trying to deploy a few dozen devices is probably going to have a tough time doing cost recovery in the beginning. If someone is trying to manage a couple dozen devices as a pure cost (just simplified maintenance), I think it would take a lot to justify moving away from doing things manually. I deal with a lot of small business network devices and I value a firmware update on a network device as 3 minutes of labor.
I also have a huge dislike for tiered features and functionality, but that's endemic to the tech industry in general and I can't imagine any established companies being able to move away from it. The reason I dislike it is that anything I would build would be on the scale of a weekend side project and I feel like I have to adjust my strategy based on the scale of my project. For example, I might start with manual device management to keep costs low initially and then move through the different tiers of something like Balena as I grow.
Compared to something like the old Mender pricing where IIRC it was a linear cost per device with all features included and a minimum cost of $10 per month, the current pricing, scaling, and tiering strategies are awful for small developers. I know anything I build as a side project has a limited chance of being successful. I don't want to pre-plan a cost minimizing scaling strategy, but I don't want to YOLO it and hope for the best if if I end up with something successful.
What I'd want out of a platform like Balena is a setup where I can just build the best solution on day one and throw money at it to scale if it becomes necessary. However, the reality is I'll probably end up stuck in those low scale scenarios I described above, so, IMHO, that pricing is built for you to make money off of me failing, not for mutual benefit.
To be fair, I assume Mender couldn't sustain their old pricing, but I think platforms like Cloudflare could make that kind of pricing more tenable in the future. At least I hope so.