For over a year now, we've had a premium subscription plan available on the AirGradient Dashboard, and, to be honest, we never loved it. We don't like paying for subscriptions ourselves, so putting one on our own product always sat a little uncomfortably with our team. Back when we added it, we wrote a whole post explaining why we felt it was needed, and you can still read that here.
The short version is that we were worried about increasing server costs as more monitors came online, and a subscription looked like the safest way to keep things running. However, with tens of thousands of monitors now online, we believe our infrastructure is sustainable and optimised enough that we don't need to pass the costs on to you. This is largely due to the fact that over the past couple of years we've put a lot of work into optimising our servers, meaning our costs haven't climbed anywhere near as much as we'd feared. Subscriptions were never our business model. Rather, they were a hedge against those server costs. Now, we've optimised enough that the costs sit at a point where we believe it's better not to charge for them at all.
Furthermore, it feels like everything has drifted towards a monthly fee and we don’t want you to have to choose between more air quality data or a Netflix subscription. So, after many internal discussions, we've decided we're not going down that road and we're switching subscriptions off.
What happens to the premium features? They're not going anywhere, and we've already rolled them into the free dashboard. This means that every dashboard now gets access to the previously premium features. If you upgraded recently and you'd rather have your money back, we understand. Drop us a message at support@airgradient.com and we'll sort out a refund.
We want AirGradient to stay easy to use and, more importantly, accessible, and a paywall doesn't fit that. When we first added the subscription, we honestly weren't sure we could keep things sustainable without it. As it turns out, we can. Oh, and in case you’re worried, don’t be; our API and other services stay free, the same as it's always been. And now that it's free, that doesn't make you the product. We don't sell your data and we never use it without your consent - that hasn't changed and it won't.
