The Fourth of July is the perfect backdrop to announce that we’re throwing off the oppressive shackles that gateways have imposed on the Pollen community — we’re eliminating them with a new “cloud gateway” architecture that we’re calling Greenhouse.

What does this mean?

• Most importantly, this means lower Flower costs — we no longer need to cover the cost of including a mini-computer with each Pollen Flower
• It also means simplicity — most Flowers will become truly “plug and play”
• Higher reliability — we’re eliminating a potential source of failure in the network
• Scalability — we’re also eliminating a potential chokepoint in the Pollen supply chain and dramatically simplifying the configuration required prior to shipping Flowers

To launch the Beeta™ rollout of Greenhouse, a limited quantity of Greenhouse-enabled Dandelions will be available for sale this Friday, July 8 at noon PT / 3pm ET for $776.

Greenhouse is going to enable us to reduce prices on all Flowers going forward, with the goal of making small cells as ubiquitous as Wi-Fi routers.

What does this mean for Flowers that have already been deployed?

• Nothing — Flowers with gateways will continue to work as they do today. In the future, you’ll be able to eliminate your gateway if you’d like to
• However, there will be future use cases where gateways will still be useful, so don’t ditch them just for the sake of ditching them

More details, including a more complete FAQ, can be found here.

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