[sumtechguy]

Whispernet only 'worked' because of the pricing structure they had with their MDN, the amount of books they were selling with it, and trying to break into the market and willing to eat some cost to do so. Also notice they retired it. That means it was not working pricewise.

To put it this way lets say the ODM makes a device for 40 bucks and sells it to you for 50. Their cost to their MDN/carrier is say 1 dollar per month per device. That means at best they can float you for is 10 months before you start costing them money. That does not involve any other services they may have to pay for to make that connection happen (support, VMs/machines, phone lines, datalines, buildings, etc). But if there is an extra ARPU on each unit that time to cost you money is much longer and in some cases never happen.

They way they priced this it looks like they are trying to get people into the ecosystem and are willing to eat some cost on that. Hoping to get a few whale accounts to cover the 'free' bits.

> ensure that your device is certified on a carrier, or get it ptcrb certified - sign up for a carrier contract - acquire/activate the sim - pay a monthly fee per-device (and sometimes also per-fleet) - figure out how to not needlessly pay when devices are broken or end-of-life - and so on

That is exactly what MDNs like this do. They do that carrier abstraction for you. They do however charge for it. Each of the big carriers also do this and have programs for it. They have a list of pre-certified devices and 'try before you buy' style programs.

[rozzie]

I was using Whispernet as an example of a great user experience; that's all.

There are no tricks and our prepaid/embedded pricing is real, and we will never sell anything for a loss. We're selling commercial IoT and our business must be sustainable. (Free tier of Notehub is an acquisition cost and that cost is extremely low.)

[sumtechguy]

fair points. wispernet was one of the first of that type. In many ways the pricing structure you are getting now is because of the efforts after that. What you are paying for 150mb we would have got maybe 10-20k in that era. Steve Jobs really did the IoT market a solid with the iPhone and its data plan.

It looks like pre-paid data cards which eventually 'run out'. Which should keep you from having any loss. Aside from incidental support and promotional costs.

It sounds like you are building a similar business that I used to work at. Good luck! It is a tough market with a long tail sales cycle. Some go 'quick' and are up and running in a couple of months. Some take a couple years to get really going.

If I have one piece of advice. Keep an eye on your 'connect/disconnect' metrics. You always get that one device that will decide to bounce the connection 80k times per day. Get a few dozen of those and it will swamp out your other devices.

[majormajor]

> Whispernet only 'worked' because of the pricing structure they had with their MDN, the amount of books they were selling with it, and trying to break into the market and willing to eat some cost to do so. Also notice they retired it. That means it was not working pricewise.

3G Whispernet couldn't outlast the carriers getting rid of the hardware to support those frequencies. So yes, that means "forever" didn't work price-wise, in that Amazon didn't feel it was worthwhile to build their own outdated-tech cell network just to continue it, but it was still a reasonable "for most of the life of the device" offer - note that newer devices have 4g and still will work.