Thank you for an incredible 2023!

At the end of the year there’s always an opportunity to review how the year went, and I'm gonna take this opportunity to share the review of 2023 for FlowFuse. It's been an incredible year for FlowFuse and we've achieved a lot with our team.

#  FlowFuse branding

First off; in 2023 we were known as FlowForge. But, due to some trademark challenges, we went through a rebranding phase over the summer. It's been a bit of an adjustment, and you might still catch us – and even some of our customers – occasionally slipping up with the old name. But overall, we're really pleased with how smoothly everything's transitioned.

#  Product adoption

On the product side: Growth in adoption of the FlowFuse platform has been tremendous, in many dimensions; revenue generated, customers onboarded, and how many users are now professionalizing their usage of Node-RED. Our development platform has been used by thousands of developers to acquire data from various sources and visualize it to build rich applications for their use cases. And at every step of the way we’ve been able to improve their experience.

Data acquisition was always possible without FlowFuse, however we’ve improved on the status quo through the Certified Nodes program. A nascent program that vets often used custom nodes from the community to ensure business readiness and validate nodes to ensure there’s no malicious code installed.

Further, this year we’ve started Dashboard 2.0. The development of the successor of node-red-dashboard, which is built on deprecated technology and effectively on life-support. The development of the new Dashboard technology has taken massive steps and it’s very stable. Feature parity is not yet achieved, though we’re happy with the adoption of Dashboard 2.0 and the community reporting issues and improvements.

With the product improvements to FlowFuse, we’ve empowered large audiences to try and adopt the product. We’ve seen adoption in many areas:

1. Process manufacturing – Mining, oil & gas, beverages.
2. Discrete manufacturing – Ranging from automotive to logistics use-cases.
3. Digital transformation – Digital only integration, from website back-ends to workflow engines for up-skilled employees.
4. Agriculture – From environment monitoring to controlling sprinklers, water-pumps, and more.
5. Education & Research – Hundreds of students have registered for FlowFuse to learn how IIoT works, start building solutions, and prepare themselves for employing these skills in their first jobs.

We’re always happy to support you in any of these or other industries where you may find value in how we streamline operations, manage your data acquisition logic and roll out, and remain compliant during your journey.

#  Pricing changes

A driving force behind the horizontal nature of adoption of the FlowFuse development platform has been the introduction of the 3 product tiers earlier this year. We’ve introduced a Starter package, Team and Enterprise tiers.

The starter package allows everyone to adopt the core features of FlowFuse and Node-RED. It provides hosting of 2 Node-RED instances in the Cloud and management of 2 Node-REDs on the edge.

A user can be promoted to the Team or Enterprise tier when they’re ready to further professionalize their adoption and have access to enhanced compliance, faster time to value for their developers, among other features.

#  What 2024 will bring

FlowFuse will continue to support the Node-RED community at large. In 2024 we’re looking to further grow into the main development platform for low-code developers. While our main focus will remain around Node-RED, there’s more to be done to become the defacto low-code development platform. Core of which are a few pillars:

1. Time to value for developers
2. Empowering more employees to automate the software layer of the solution
3. Enhanced compliance and enforcement

We’re hoping to continue to serve our customers and grow the customer base in 2024!

#  Holiday Season Support

Over the next couple of weeks (22nd December - 2nd January), most of our team will be taking some well deserved time off. Don't worry, we will still be available if you need emergency support. The best way to contact us is via our website's support page.