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Free public beta until December 4, 2026: every course is open, no card needed. After that, the first chapter of each course stays free and full access is a one-time $39 ($19 for up to 100 founding members chosen for helpful feedback). Your progress is kept. How the beta works

Every way to move data from a device to the cloud

A radio for the first hop, a protocol on top, a direct path or a gateway, and a choice of how often and how much. Distance, power and direction decide most of it.

Choose in this order; each answer narrows the next.

  • The first hop: which radio? Distance, data rate, power budget, latency and monthly cost. Wi-Fi or Ethernet in a building with an access point; BLE to a phone a few metres away; ESP-NOW between boards with no access point; Thread, Zigbee or Matter in a home mesh; LoRaWAN for kilometres at a few bytes; cellular (LTE-M, NB-IoT) anywhere with coverage, for a monthly fee.
  • The path: direct or through a gateway? An IP-capable device can talk to the cloud itself. A BLE, Zigbee or LoRa device can't, so a gateway translates; a gateway also buys local autonomy when the internet is down.
  • The protocol on top. A device that sleeps and only sends: one HTTPS request per wake. Many devices and consumers, commands that must arrive promptly: MQTT. A browser talking to one device: a WebSocket. A very constrained device on a lossy link: CoAP.
  • How often and how much. The message count usually sets the cloud bill, so batching, reporting by exception and processing at the edge are the levers; payload format matters mostly on links that count every byte.

The first hop

The comparison across every radio, from distance, data, power, latency and cost.

Section

Wi-Fi

Section

Ethernet

Section

ESP-NOW

Section

Cellular IoT

The path

Protocol translation, local autonomy, and one more box to secure and update.

Term

gateway

See section →
A box that sits between devices and the rest of the system, translating, buffering or filtering their messages.
See section →
A gateway turning one protocol into another, such as BLE readings into MQTT messages.
See section →
A site carrying on with its essential jobs when it can't reach the cloud.

The protocol on top

Direction first, then power, then the network's open ports.

Section

HTTPS requests

Section

WebSockets

Section

CoAP

How often and how much

Section

Cost and scale

Messages per month, wire GB and stored GB, and which lever moves the bill.

Term

batching

See section →
Saving up several readings and writing them in one go, which is much cheaper than one write each.

Example

Five readings per message every 300 s cut the greenhouse's illustrative bill from $13.49 to $3.01 a month.

JSON, CBOR or Protobuf; the saving is real on LoRaWAN and NB-IoT, small on Wi-Fi.