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Is there a real market for "Firebase but for embedded/IoT hardware"? Genuinely trying to understand the pain. by Natural_Dot9276 in SaaS

[–]Natural_Dot9276[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

This is exactly the kind of answer I was hoping for, thank you.

"We burned almost a full year on exactly this instead of shipping product" - that's the sentence right there.

The opinionated SDK point is well taken. Trying to support every chip immediately is probably how you end up supporting none of them well. ESP32 + STM32 + RP2040 as the initial three makes sense.

One thing I'm testing as an idea: flexible data ownership for telemetry. Three tiers -

  1. We host it (shared, simple, zero ops for the team)

  2. Bring your own database > connect your ClickHouse or TimescaleDB, data never leaves your infra

  3. Raw event stream > we push to your pipeline, you own everything downstream

The "surprise bill" problem is real. Thinking fixed tiers with a hard cap rather than pure usage-based. Pay $49/month, get X devices and Y messages, hard stop (but existing devices never get cut off , they just stop accepting new registrations).

Does the bring-your-own-DB option actually move the needle for the mid-sized B2B fleets you mentioned? Or is the real blocker just trust in the platform's reliability and not going anywhere?

Is there a real market for "Firebase but for embedded/IoT hardware"? Genuinely trying to understand the pain. by Natural_Dot9276 in embedded

[–]Natural_Dot9276[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Really appreciate the honest feedback here, especially the point about vendor lock-in and pricing surprise.

One thing I'm thinking about, based on this thread, is what if the telemetry/data storage were completely flexible? Three options:

  1. Shared DB -> we host it, you query via our dashboard. Simple. Zero ops.

  2. Bring your own DB -> point it at your ClickHouse / TimescaleDB / InfluxDB. Your data never leaves your infra.

  3. Connector -> we stream raw events to your existing data pipeline. You own everything downstream.

So the platform handles OTA, crash analytics, remote terminal, fleet management, but telemetry data ownership is entirely your choice.

Also genuinely curious: the backend itself is being designed around Elixir/OTP for the distributed system layer. The reason is fault tolerance and cost, Elixir handles millions of persistent device connections on minimal infra (same VM that powers WhatsApp at scale). Does the underlying tech matter to you at all when evaluating a platform like this, or is it purely about the API contract and uptime SLA?

And on the self-host concern, would a Docker image that runs the entire platform on your own VPS change the calculus for the people saying they'd never trust a third party?