Particle sells the whole stack for a connected product in one package: modules and development boards with cellular or Wi-Fi radios, a device operating system with over-the-air updates built in, a global SIM and data plan, and a cloud console with a device registry, fleet management and integrations. The appeal is speed: a small team can get a working prototype talking to the cloud in an afternoon and scale the same design to production without changing vendors.
The trade-off is the one that comes with any integrated IoT platform: convenience and a per-device subscription in exchange for vendor lock-in on hardware and cloud. Particle is a reasonable reference point when evaluating the build-versus-buy decision described in our platforms guide.
Main products
- Device OS
- Particle Device Cloud
- EtherSIM
- Boron
- Photon 2
- M-Series and M-SoM
- Tachyon
- Ledger
Pricing model
Free plan forever with up to 100 devices and 100K Data Operations a month. Paid plans are sold in blocks of 100 devices: Basic $299 per block per month (720K Data Operations) and Plus $599 per block per month (5M Data Operations); Professional and Enterprise are custom quotes with discounted blocks. Cellular data is included for EtherSIM devices. Official pricing page.
Known limits
- The cloud works only with Particle hardware running Device OS, so hardware and cloud are a single-vendor decision
- Publish payloads capped at 1,024 bytes on Gen 3 and P2 devices (16 KB only through the CloudEvent API on Device OS 6.3+) and event names at 64 bytes
- Pricing is per 100-device block, so the 101st device costs a full extra block
- REST API limited to 10,000 requests per 5 minutes per IP address
Alternatives in the directory
- Golioth: A device-to-cloud platform for Zephyr-based IoT products: OTA updates, logging, settings and data pipelines.
- Blynk: Low-code platform for connected hardware with white-label mobile apps and device management
- Soracom: Cellular IoT connectivity with cloud-integrated services for device data, security and management
Products, pricing and limits checked against the company's official site on October 17, 2026. Prices and plans change; the official page is the reference. Spotted an error? Tell us or see the editorial policy.
Focus: device platform, cellular modules.
Tags: cellular · wi-fi · device cloud · ota · modules
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