Comment by sliken | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sliken | Hacker News Reader

A sadly common patterns, reduced API access, worse free plan, and increasing costs. Reminds me of Redhat and Reddit.

I just wanted to mention airthings. Turn key, cloud enabled, and "just works". But also has a github repo with examples for importing data into graphana, reading data from into a Raspberry Pi, etc. Said tools talk directly to the device, so you can skip the cloud completely.

I've got one gateway (if you plug in a usb-c power source) it reads data from the devices over bluetooth then uploads to the cloud. But you can do similar with a Pi. Then distribute the bluetooth sensors around the house. I was surprised to get good coverage over 3 floors of a house with BLE to a single gateway.

View plus is the gateway (when it has USB-c power, otherwise just a sensor), has radon, PM 2.5, CO2, temp, VOCs, air pressure, and humidity. It just works. Wave plus is the similar without the gateway, it has radon, CO2, temp, VOCs, air pressure, and humidity.

Nice quality hardware that "just works" out of the box with a free cloud, but you can later import the data directly (not a cloud download) into graphana or similar.

The batteries last a year or so, as advertised. The app is decent, and there's a web dashboard for more control of the presentation.

Github repos at https://github.com/Airthings

> reduced API access, worse free plan, and increasing costs.

Expect a lot more of this over the next year. We've all gotten used to generous free plans due to the era of zero percent interest and high growth; that era is ending (at least temporarily). Almost every SaaS business that has not already re-done their pricing tiers since the interest rate hikes is in the process of doing so. Oh, and ad-supported plans are going to get way more aggressive on the ads.

Although the direct effects are awful it feels like we should surely (in the long term) want services to be sustainable - i.e. the cost of the service to be paid for by its users. Where services are not sustainable (and require donations/grants) this should be explicit and transparent.

Cheap money lasted for such a long time that we're all used to being on economic painkillers 24/7.

Yes, services should be sustainable. That isn't the same thing as enabling them to extract as much money as possible in a short period of time before selling out, which is often the target these days.

Develop a long-term plan that builds a stable business, and keeps both the proprietor and customers happy, and I'm happy to support them.

> we want services to be sustainable - i.e. the cost of the service to be paid for by its users

All of this applies equally to businesses that were sustainable (or on a path to sustainability). The amount of money a business can responsibly spend on loss leaders like a free tier is dependent on growth rate and cost of capital.

Now that cost of capital has gone up and growth has gone down, the amount you can reasonably spend on loss leaders is comparatively tiny.

This does not mean we should expect fundamental changes in most business models going forward. Most startups did not take the Vision Fund approach to their business model that so fundamentally warped a few markets (Uber, WeWork, etc.)

I hope it's not going to be too bad. We'll have some delay, but soon more open source projects should fill the underserved spaces. The generous free plans stopped many interesting projects from being created, but as a side effect that's also going to change.

> I just wanted to mention airthings. Turn key, cloud enabled, and "just works".

Cloud. As soon as it's in the cloud, it's not yours.

Just a matter of time for the next round of closing some API and boom there goes your access to data.

That's optional, you can skip the cloud and download the data directly from the device over bluetooth and dump it into graphana or whatever floats your boat.

IMO it’s absurd that you cannot download over your local LAN and have to rig up a Raspberry Pi (or similar) to read via BLE. That turned me off, although I’m still looking for a sensor with radon.

I have an AirThings Wave+ (CO2, VOC, pressure, radon, temp, humidity) that I read from using an esp32 via ble (esphome) to bring the data into Home Assistant. All local, super easy to setup & 'just works'.

I'm sure you could use a Pi to pull in the data manually via ble if you have no other uses for Home Assistant.

> using an esp32

> super easy to setup & 'just works'.

Yeah right. Please tell my mom again how super easy to setup an esp32 is and that it 'just works'.

Er, unbox, pull the battery tab, open the airthings app, click adopt, and away you go. It shows the sensor readings whenever you ask and will notify you of things like humidity too low/high, CO2 being 2 high "Open a window", and the like.

If mom doesn't want to use the free cloud she might need some help, but it's about as simple as it could be for self hosting, not sure how they could make it easier.

Please consider the context of the conversation you’re replying to before getting upset about nothing.

Nobody said anything about having your non-technical mom set it up. The context was using a raspberry pi and ble to pull data from a sensor which heavily implies the person wishing to do it has a decent technical background. What I said is completely reasonable in this context.

Hosting a local server to do data collection isn’t normally something a non-technical person cares about in the slightest to begin with, so it’s pretty irrelevant. Having my devices local and using a hub of sorts to do everything is ideal, to non-technical people it’s a huge hassle. They want cloud enabled easy setup devices.

Absurd why? Battery powered for a year pretty much rules out wifi, BLE seems pretty reasonable for the use case. The code is open source so you can use whatever you want that is BLE enabled. I have a USB BLE dongle, but plenty of widgets have BLE built in.

Or just buy the more expensive model that talks wifi and plug in a USB-c to power it.

I don't see a more expensive model with wifi and USB-C.

We are talking about the Wave Plus, no?

https://www.airthings.com/wave-plus

View-plus is basically a wave-plus with an extra sensor, usb-c power, and wifi:

https://www.airthings.com/view-plus

It can run on batteries, but then you lose the functionality of bridging from BLE to wifi.

Thank you!

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