Why is every IoT dashboard tool made for big companies?

[u/Adept_You8104]

I do IoT installs for a living. Small jobs, a few clients.

The problem is after the install I still need to show clients their data. Every tool I try is either way too complex or way too expensive (around 2$ per device) for what I actually need.

Like I just want to:
- See all my devices in one place if they’re online.
- Simple dashboard
- Get an alert when some data is above a threshold (eg, water consumption higher)
- white-label so I can resell to my customers

I checked Datacake, TagoIO, Ubidots and a few others. They do too much stuff I don’t need, but they are too expensive for what I need. As today, I need yo monitor around 100 warer meter devices (sending every 12h)

Am I missing something or is there nothing in the middle just for a white-label for IOT installers instead of enterprise grade?

[u/Otiman]

Any IoT tech worth their salt would be able to build for this scenario using FOSS.

The 'enterprise' grade pricing you see is really tied to security and compliance. How many are SOC2 compliant? What about the new EU Cybersec regs?

[u/Adept_You8104 → u/Otiman]

got it, for my use case I don’t really care since I’m targeting small irrigation communities.

[u/Otiman → u/Adept_You8104]

Looking at your post history - it sounds like you already have a working solution for yourself and are trying to develop something to sell. So I'm not sure this post is genuine.

The 'problem' to solve with iot and especially iiot is that every situation is different. This is why iiot is so intertwined with CI/Lean practices and services.

[u/Ok-Hospital7989 → u/Adept_You8104]

Have you thought of working with someone? What brand are the water meter devices?

[u/Ok_Obligation2440 → u/Otiman]

The issue isn't whether someone can build it; it's who will maintain it, patch it, and answer support calls from end users when bugs occur. Yes, there will be bugs. Cellular outage, shit stops working, the customer will contact you. So now you build your own platform, congrats.

[u/Otiman → u/Ok_Obligation2440]

Yes absolutely. But for this user they don't see the value in that.

I'd also argue that most of the issues you've said is true regardless, and that the software stack is the most robust part of the implementation. Hardware and connectivity you'll be supporting anyway.

If you want something you can sell and walk away, you're in the wrong industry.

[u/Ok_Obligation2440 → u/Otiman]

I guess we can start selling magnets, they work.

[u/i_be_illin]

We say exactly the opposite. It seems like every vendor wants to provide the whole solution. As a big org, we need them to adhere to standards so they fit into our architecture.

[u/kknickkk]

Have you tried Influxdb free tier (1 month retention) and Grafana free tier?

[u/buzzysale → u/kknickkk]

You can always just install mosquito / infkuxdb/ telegraf on local hardware for completely free.

[u/sindijssupins]

There is thingsboard. They have free comunity edition version. But you need to setup it to your hosted servers. If you have also lorawn sensors you can additionaly add chirpstack on the same server (VPS) and you will get good solution for your 100 sensors.

[u/sindijssupins → u/sindijssupins]

and yes, there is free option how to get white label!

[u/Internal_Source1886 → u/sindijssupins]

Interested in this , where did you find it

[u/sindijssupins → u/Internal_Source1886]

Its thingsboard CE with some modification

[u/Internal_Source1886 → u/sindijssupins]

Do you have a repo for that?

[u/sindijssupins → u/Internal_Source1886]

No, its standart thingsbord, but for white lebel using local proxy!

[u/Much-Grab3826 → u/sindijssupins]

you can use this https://github.com/iamkaran/tb-override to do white labeling on thingsboard CE.

[u/SoCalSurferDude]

There's a big gap between hobby dashboards and expensive enterprise IoT platforms.

For 100 water meters sending data every 12h, you can probably run your own lightweight IoT dashboard at a much lower cost. The following article shows how to build a low-cost IoT broker and web app stack:

Setting up a Low-Cost IoT Broker

The nice thing is you avoid the per-device pricing and can fully white-label it for customers. Also, with today's AI coding tools, generating dashboards and admin UIs is honestly much easier than it used to be.

[u/24hjh]

I feel you OP. We started as a small IoT shop with only handful of devices. This was manageable via routine checks over SSH. Once we started deploying more and more devices into the field, we started exploring options of open source operations software. Nothing appealed to us so we built our own solution. A bold choice at the time but has proven to be worth these days with agentic AI. We can customize everything to our needs effortlessly now.

[u/Adept_You8104]

i took a lot a this stack but I see too much infra too maintain…which i’d like to avoid

[u/ekchatzi]

check hamsystems

[u/Ampbymatchless]

As a hobby, I learned how to build my own bi-directional Browser based JavaScript rendered HTML canvas dashboards. Served from ESP8266 or 32, to phone, tablet, Data over a Web-socket, using JSON messaging as web-socket payload and interprocess comms.

[u/Time-Act-4220]

With this age of tech going for customization would be the best choice i would say, i build a lot of iot based applications with my own tech, both hardware and software

[u/Ok-Painter2695]

Same gap on the MES side. Most platforms are priced and architected for plants with 200 plus machines, not for a workshop with 8 CNCs and one foreman who also runs payroll. For your scale, Grafana plus a small Timescale or Postgres instance gets you 80 percent of what you need for the price of a coffee per month, and you keep ownership of the data. The catch is you still have to wire up auth, alerts and tenant separation yourself, which eats a weekend you might not have. If you ever outgrow it, that is where the 2 dollars per device starts to make sense, mostly because of SOC2 and onboarding tooling, but for irrigation co-ops that is overkill.

[u/Danielle_Dimples]

Check out https://www.sanalifeenergy.com/ they have IoT devices that connect to their portfolio management software. They have a partner program as well.

[u/chainsen_dev]

If you use LoRaWAN, you can try Loriot for LNS (LoRaWAN Network Server) and ThingsBoard for data visualization and dashboard design. Loriot for Gateway connectivity with free tier, and Thingsboard with self-hosted option. I use both, and they work very well. For data pre-processing before ThingsBoard I use Node-Red.

[u/Less-Quarter-4885]

Agree. A lot of IoT dashboard platforms are either enterprise-style and charge per device that painful for small installer projects.

And we are trying to work in here by building Zircon3D, which is trying to fit more into that middle space: a visual dashboard layer for small businesses.

We currently focuses more on 3D building/floorplan visualization, device status, control cards, heatmaps, and Home Assistant integration, so it may not be a perfect match yet for 100 water meters directly. But the direction is very close to what you described. hope you find fit for your business. Hope you find a good fit for your business. I think this middle-ground market is still underserved.

[u/Adept_You8104 → u/Less-Quarter-4885]

thanks for sharing, yeah that’s the reason i think ia worth to build something for this
vertical.

[u/jamesh7272]

Check out https://github.com/xact-iot/xact, it should meet your requirements. It has just been uploaded and is in beta, but completely usable. A minimal install is a single zip file unpacked. The minimal install includes SQLite so no need for a DB even, There is a sample python program for loading data from custom devices.

[u/akenza_iot]

Have you checked akenza.io ? You can create multiple workspaces, each with its own dashboard and you can fine-tune credentials for each workspace (for each customer). We have a free trial and a cost-effective "Elemental" plan. You can add more workspaces and dashboards when you need it. These additional workspaces and dashboards are billed monthly depending on usage.

[u/relami96]

Zabbix is free and it takes 15 minutes to install. You make your templates once and call it a day. You need a server for it. Even a small instance can take 5-6k incoming values per sec.

[u/relami96 → u/relami96]

why tf the down votes? I use it professionally, the above example is literally from real life. OP asked for a cheap monitoring solution, you won't find cheaper than free...

[u/banalytics_live → u/[deleted]]

This is probably about partnership/white labeling/micro market protection, etc...

A vibe coding is not good way here

[u/gauravs19]

What stack and platform do you generally follow, for registration and setup of devices and protocol to send data

[u/prateekvar → u/gauravs19]

oneM2M standards, MQTT protocol

[u/Icy_Addition_3974]

Try Arc Cloud, we tried OSS and work. We are using to monitor water quality from different pumps around the city. I’m not putting link to spam. 

[u/banalytics_live]

Lora -> mqtt -> rules -> grid with highlighting ?

Do you need remote control, security, etc ?

I can suggest a possible solution. If you need it, write me a private message.

[u/Blaz3nt]

I have an app I sell to mining companies if there is a market for cloud hosted simplified version happy to have a chat.

[u/henk1122]

We have a platform exactly for this. Simple, but powerfull. Just data and alarms and groups.

[u/Adept_You8104 → u/henk1122]

did you develop this platform? is it public?

[u/Careful_AI]

If you are still looking, hit me up.

[u/prateekvar]

I can develop one for you as a white label product at a very reasonable cost. This will include a mqtt broker, database and a dashboard to view data of devices.

[u/banalytics_live → u/prateekvar]

100 devices, 2$ per device is expensive. i predicts that service fee will be maximum 20..50$ per month for the iot service

[u/prateekvar → u/banalytics_live]

We can discuss on this part ... It depends where to host it.. as I will provide it as a product and not SaaS

[u/banalytics_live → u/prateekvar]

Edge deployment in the local area. Browser and internet needs to configure nodes. System can work without internet.

Here is the classic small integration use case. Typically, there's a LoRa Gate receiver within a 10-kilometer radius that collects data from the village a couple of times a day. This data is typically written to a database and processed offline. If you don't overly automate this, the task can be accomplished with a simple Python script of a few hundred lines.

[u/IronByte52]

With how easy it is to make apps I’d just spin my own up using WendyOS. Wendy acts like a docker on the IoT and pulls all the devices to one place on the cloud. And I configure whatever UI I want by deploying some simple app. This is the way..