Hacker News Reader

Comment by localhost3000 | Hacker News Reader

I appreciate what you guys are doing and get that you're here to make a profit etc but even now at this super early stage the market for beacon hardware is so competitive that you've totally priced yourself out for people like me. I'll be deploying >1000 beacons this year. Beacons take about 30 seconds to configure using a configuration app (of which there are many). The biggest cost in doing a deployment is literally transporting the thing to it's location and placing it. The hardware should cost next to nothing (which it will pretty soon). The real value, like you've said, is in the services running atop the hardware. Just my opinion... That said, I'm interested in hearing what a partnership looks like w/ you guys since, as I said, I am deploying many beacons this year and for the foreseeable future.

View on HN

We're about a month away from releasing really inexpesnive iBeacons w/ sensors, ARM, etc. -- sub $10.

You can program them to do additional processing if you want. What's your email address? Would love to have you as part of our beta.

ian.stanczyk at gmail

Ok.

Could I get some more info on this as well? jar3737@gmail.com

Sure.

Very interested to learn more. Looking to make a purchase of about ~500 - 800 units in 2 months. otgilbert (at) gmail.com

Will you email me info pls? david at aisleup.com

Can you send me info as well plg at sixdoors

We are also working on these, target sub 10 euro, combined with high-voltage (230V in Europe) switch functionality. All this stuff is still way too expensive on the moment.

I'd be interested to learn more as well ibeacon@formlabs.com

would also like to get in on this tashoecraft@gmail.com

Thanks so much for discussing with us. We’d love to engage with you directly and get you a quote for larger 1,000 and up beacon quantities. I’m available at steve at estimote dot com. Estimote has been 100% focused on making the initial experience with developers easy and fast. As such we’re selling the hardware as a kit for $99. But we don’t charge that much for bulk beacon orders. The challenge with deploying 1,000 beacons is not the beacon cost as you point out – it’s in security, extensibility and all the elements of RAS that a networking protocol carries with it. In fact all of those are smaller parts of your overall cost, which is to build a mobile app and experience. We understand that. These deployments are much more similar to enterprise Wi-Fi in that regard – access points are a small percentage of the deployment of Wi-Fi. In fact, even one site deployment of beacons which needs to be switched out (say due to failure) would cost more than the beacons themselves. Which is why saving a few thousand dollars on beacons makes no sense. Trust me we’re tripling down on 100% fully integrated hw / sw in order to create the tools and end to end experience that developers need to be successful.

Maybe it's also worth looking into some of their competitors. I've bought some beacons from Kontakt.io as well as Onyx Beacon. They both had similar offering. For Onyx Beacon I also ordered 50 for an event we were doing since they had good pricing and they shipped it to us in one day.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com