Foundries.io restructures its pricing with a free Community tier
Foundries.io, now part of Qualcomm, is launching a free tier for its managed software service for the Internet of Things (IoT) as part of a restructuring of its pricing.
This is part of a move to make Qualcomm more friendly to developers, George Grey VP software at Qualcomm and co-founder of foundries.io tells eeNews Europe.
“The Community offering is new,” said Grey. “We did offer a free 30 day evaluation but we found that it was difficult to evaluate fully so we decided to have a community version that is initially limited to a number of devices, x86 and DragonWing but we expect to add other boards later this year.”
“I think this demonstrates Qualcomm’s more developer friendly approach. It’s happening elsewhere at Qualcomm as well with more announcements about chips and development boards and this is contributing to changes that we see all across Qualcomm.”
The community tier is also limited to a small number of devices. “If you want more than 10 devices come and talk to us but its for personal use, for makers,” said Grey.
“The other thing is a change in strategy in pricing. Traditionally what we have had an annual fee as there is a high support cost in the development phase. Now [as part of Qualcomm] we can take a longer view so we have dramatically reduced the entry cost for developers so they can have a much lower subscription cost during the development phase and then there is a per device payment in production.”
“Foundries Factory is a software as a service (SaaS) to manage the lifecycle of products, from development and provisioning to securing and production as well as fleet management, and that helps OEMs with the software bill of materials (sBoM) and secure boot.”
“However there is a spin on this as we feel very strongly that customers in very high volume should benefit from economies of scale rather than be penalised. So device pricing starts a $1/month/device and decreases to zero with volume up to 100,000. So for larger number of devices there is a cap unless it’s in the millions of devices when there is negotiation depending on the number of updates required.”
The Startup tier costs $500/month for developers to build a project. “We can provide a discount for the first year, so we are trying to be more developer friendly,” said Grey.
The Professional tier is $1500/month for three seats so if the project dies there is no long term commitment for developers.
“That’s a far lower cost than we have offered before,” said Grey. All of this is part of changes at Qualcomm he says.
“Clearly it has been a fascinating challenge to come from a startup with a lot of freedom to a large company with a lot of process. That’s always a huge challenge but I think one of the good thing is we bring a lot of expertise in open source in this market into Qualcomm and we are already seeing the benefits we are bringing to Qualcomm, particularly on the Foundries Factory project,” he said.
“They are continuing to also recognise that working in this space involves working with competitors where OEMs do not want to be locked into a single vendor and they want choice and don’t want a different stack for different vendors. There’s good recognition within Qualcomm that this is a good way to go and we have been building support for Qualcomm SoCs into our platform.”
“One of the things we will be announcing at Embedded World is open builds for both Yocto and Debian on Github for everyone to use on some of the newer SoCs, particularly the iQ6, 8 and 9 for industrial and edge IoT applications.”
“Qualcomm have Ubuntu in preview for the DragonWing RB3 Gen2 development board but Debian provides upstream support in a more accessible way that has hitherto not been available to developers to address the smaller developers.”
www.qualcomm.com; www.foundries.io
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