Turn your remote-reading installs into recurring revenue

You have fitted the meters. Now what?

You have already done the hard part: changing or adapting the meters, deploying the coverage, registering the devices and getting the readings to arrive. The field work is done and invoiced.

But your customer does not want frames. They want their consumption, their history, and someone to tell them when something is wrong. And that question — "where do I look?" — is not one your network server answers: its interface is built for an engineer, not for the chair of a residents association.

You install once. You bill every month.

It is the same fleet of meters you have already fitted, invoiced differently. The field work does not change: what you can charge for it does.

You decide what to charge. Datakubo supplies the software. We invoice you for the platform; the commercial relationship with your customer stays yours.

Run it on your own numbers

Put in the meters you already have connected and the monthly fee you decide to charge for each one. The figure that comes out is what you would bill your customers.

Illustrative example. The 2 EUR starting point is only somewhere to start moving the figure: it is not a recommended price and not a market rate. You set the fee.

How it connects to what you already have

The integration is an HTTP forward. Your network server already receives the decoded uplink; you just tell it to send it to Datakubo as well, with your API key in the header.

We do not replace your LNS. ChirpStack, The Things Network or whichever server your gateway ships with keep managing the network, the keys and device provisioning.

With NB-IoT you do not even need a gateway

NB-IoT meters carry their own SIM and send straight to Datakubo’s HTTP endpoint over the cellular network. No gateway and no network server in between.

It is the sensible option when the points are scattered — plots, wells, isolated homes — and a LoRaWAN gateway would cover two or three meters.

The vendor trap: software that only reads their meters

It is the most common pattern in the sector. You buy meters from a manufacturer and they offer you their platform "free", or nearly. The small print is that the platform only understands their meters.

The day you want to change brand — on price, on lead time, or because the customer already has something else fitted — you find that changing meter means changing software, and changing software means moving every one of your customers to a new portal.

• Your hardware supplier stops being a technical decision and becomes one you cannot walk away from
• You negotiate meter prices from a far weaker position
• A mixed fleet — normal once you have a few years behind you — ends up spread across two or three platforms
• If the manufacturer raises prices or discontinues a model, the problem is yours

Datakubo does not sell meters. Any water meter that reports on its own works, and payloads are normalised on the way in, so meters from different manufacturers appear in the same view with the same charts and the same alert rules. If you have a payload we do not support, we write the decoder free within 24 hours.

You could build it. But should you?

A dashboard with charts takes a few weeks. What eats the year is everything around it that turns those charts into something you can put in front of a customer and charge for.

• Users, permissions and per-resident access
• Isolation between customers (multi-tenancy)
• History and roll-ups that survive years of readings
• Alerts and anomaly detection that do not cry wolf
• Branding, subdomain and per-customer look
• A decoder for every new payload that lands on you
• Security, backups and recovery
• Maintenance and support, Sundays included

And none of those pieces is ever finished: every new meter, every odd payload and every network-server upgrade lands back on your desk.

Every hour you spend building software is an hour you are not installing or selling. Datakubo lets you offer that layer without creating it from scratch.

Your customer gets a portal. You get a new service line.

Two different products over the same data: what your customer opens, and what you open to run your whole book.

Your customer never sees the name Datakubo

Switch brand in the selector and look at what your customer sees when they log in. Same product: the only thing that changes is whose it is.

You upload your logo, pick your colour and your customers log in at your subdomain. We bill you; what you charge your customer is your decision and your invoice.

Real catches

What the platform flagged on its own, before the bill did.

From your data to your customer’s portal

Four steps. Only the first is technical, and it is an HTTP forward.

1. 1

   Connect

   Add an HTTP forward on your network server pointing at the Datakubo ingestion endpoint, with your API key in the header. On NB-IoT the meter sends straight there, with no gateway in between.

2. 2

   Organise

   Create the community as a customer and assign its meters and zones. Meters register themselves on their first reading.

3. 3

   Brand it

   Upload your logo, pick your brand colour and set your subdomain. That is what your customer sees when they log in.

4. 4

   Hand it over

   Invite the residents by email and each one lands on their own. From there you have a service you can bill every month.

What it costs

A fixed monthly fee with meters included, plus a price per additional meter. No setup fee and no lock-in: if it does not fit, you cancel.

• Starter plan from €49/mo, with 20 meters included
• White label, the customer portal and in-app alarms included from the first plan (email notifications on Professional)
• What you charge your customer is your decision, and your invoice
• No per-user cost: add as many residents as you need

We carry the risk

Two written guarantees, so setting it up does not cost you an evening

We are not asking you to spend your evenings fighting a payload: we set it up with you on the call. If something does not work, we fix it and it costs you nothing.

Both guarantees apply from day one and on any plan. No small print.

Installer questions