IoT App Development Agency for Connected Products

Cost tracks a handful of variables more than anything else: how many distinct device types you need to support, which protocols are involved, whether firmware work is in scope or handled by your team, whether you need a companion app as well as an admin console, and the fleet size at launch. A single device type with an existing firmware stack and one dashboard is a materially different project from a multi-tenant platform with OTA and white labelling. We quote after discovery, not before.

That is the majority of our work. We start by reading the firmware, datasheets, and any existing protocol documentation, then design the cloud and app layers around the device as it currently behaves. If we find something on the device side that will cause trouble at scale, we say so and show the cost of both paths — but we do not open with a recommendation to respin the board.

Devices should keep doing their job offline. We add a ring buffer sized to your expected outage window so readings are stored locally, then forwarded with their original timestamps once the link returns. Server-side, messages carry a device-generated ID so replayed data deduplicates cleanly. On the fleet dashboard, absence of data raises its own alert rather than quietly looking like a healthy device.

If devices report continuously or need commands pushed to them, MQTT is usually the answer — one persistent connection, small per-message overhead, and native server-initiated messaging. HTTP makes sense for devices that wake occasionally, send one payload, and sleep, or where a corporate firewall makes a long-lived connection impractical. On metered cellular, HTTP header overhead on small readings can dominate the bill.

Yes, and we treat it as core infrastructure rather than a later feature. That means signed images verified on the device, a staged rollout to a canary group before the full fleet, resumable downloads for slow links, an A/B partition scheme or equivalent so a bad image can roll back, and version reporting on the dashboard so you can see exactly which units are on which build.

The main drivers are the number of device types, whether cloud infrastructure already exists, how many integrations the platform needs, and whether certification or regulatory review sits on the critical path. A connectivity spike proving real devices into a real pipeline comes early and quickly. Full production rollout with OTA, multi-tenancy, and analytics takes considerably longer. Timelines are committed after discovery.

You do, from the first sprint. Repositories, cloud accounts, CI pipelines, and Terraform state live in your organisation, and we work inside them. There is no platform licence, no hosting we control, and nothing that has to be migrated if you bring the work in-house or move to another vendor later.

Each device gets its own identity — typically an X.509 certificate provisioned at manufacture — so a single compromised unit can be revoked without touching the rest of the fleet. Transport is mutual TLS, cloud permissions are scoped per device rather than per fleet, firmware is signed, and access to the console is role-based with an audit trail. Regulated deployments add retention and residency rules on top.