But of course github stars and positive reviews won't pay our bills. So it totally makes sense to charge what you are charging for your product. You deserve it, and you're clearly putting in hard and honest work. If and when I need a KVM I will 100% be reaching for a TinyPilot.
But I personally don't care about support, the enclosure can be 3d printed or some cheap plastic box, if sold as DIY kit it would save assembly costs and avoid need for certification and so on. I think there is a small market for homelabers like myself who would pay maybe $100-150 for a simpler product.
And congrats on being profitable.
We used to sell both the pre-made units and a $190 DIY kit. Surprisingly, when I tried removing the DIY kits, sales jumped by 50%. And it wasn't just higher revenue because people were buying the more expensive product - order volume increased too.[0]
My theory is that when we asked customers if they wanted to pay more for a pre-made version, some of them stopped to think about which version they wanted and then just never returned. So, when we simplified to just one product, it eliminated friction in the buying process.
With the Pi 4 shortage the past few years, using our limited Pi 4 supply for DIY kits instead of our pre-made product would be a terrible move. We're expecting the shortage to be over in the next few months, but even if there was a way for me to sell an extra 50 units per month at a $50 profit, selling a second product line and managing it end-to-end is so complicated that it wouldn't be worth the extra $2.5k/month. And that $2.5k/month is before chargebacks, hiring people to assemble and fulfill the kits, etc.
We do still work to serve DIY customers and make sure our software stays compatible with users who just use off-the-shelf parts. And we still sell a power splitter,[1] as it's the one thing you can't really buy off the shelf from other vendors. We're able to do that because they cost about $10/unit to make, so we can make a year's worth in a week and just ship them to our warehouse. But doing that with a whole kit would be way more costly.
[0] https://mtlynch.io/retrospectives/2021/12/#reducing-to-a-sin...
[1] https://tinypilotkvm.com/product/tinypilot-power-connector
Is it possible to order current revision of TinyPilot for someone in a remote location and connect to it on arrival through some managed service - without going through all the hoops of helping end user with setting up some form of reverse shell (e.g. either meshcentral or openvpn/wireguard for webinterface)?
Customers could do that on their end, but they'd have to buy the device from us, configure it for remote access,[0] and then forward the device to the final destination.
Technical details here: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/mdevaev/pikvm-v4/posts/...
If you REALLY want to try it and you have PiKVM, you can contact us at Discord (https://discord.gg/bpmXfz5) and we will give you access to the beta version.
I understand the feedback about the price. When I created the original TinyPilot,[0] I wanted a low-priced alternative to the $600 KVM over IP options I was seeing, and now I sell my devices for $400-500/unit.
The thing that's tough about selling hardware is that it seems easy to produce a few units cheaply, but creating a sustainable business for it, the costs add up. You have to fulfill orders, provide support when there are delivery issues, provide support when the customer has trouble understanding how to connect to a device on their local network. And there's certification, stockpiling components so you don't run out of stock, managing inventory from many different vendors.
TinyPilot became profitable in 2023, but for the first 2.5 years, we were operating at a loss. [1]
Also, small correction: no KVM over IP vendor is really selling open hardware. The part that's open is the software. I haven't seen any vendors publish their hardware schematics. It's expensive to create PCBs, and it's not like open-source software where you can hope to get useful external contributions.
[0] https://tinypilotkvm.com/blog/build-a-kvm-over-ip-under-100
[1] https://mtlynch.io/retrospectives/2023/10/#tinypilothttpstin...