Cost of pre-registering inactive devices

Product support
1

Hi,
If I register a device using balena-cli: balena device register AppID --uuid ${UUID} (then etching to SD card) to have devices in a warehouse before it gets connected, will I have to pay per month for those inactive but pre-registered devices?

If so, what should I do to avoid that?

Thanks in advance

5

Hi @tibhel,
Devices pre-registered from the balena-cli with balena device register AppID --uuid ${UUID} do appear in the balenaCloud dashboard as inactive.
As a result they are not counted against your plan’s allowance and only start to do so the first time that they do get online.
The warehouse use case was a big part of how inactive devices & device deactivation was designed,
so let us know how this works for your use case.

Let me also point you to our billing documentation page about inactive devices:
https://www.balena.io/docs/learn/manage/billing/#inactive-devices

Kind regards,
Thodoris

8

Hi @thgreasi ,

Okay that’s great. Right now I’m just using the free plan and it alerted me this after registering 10+ inactive devices, so I was not quite sure about it:

[![image|690x29](upload://dSZUM5eMy2BGRcqv8qGtjr8rrTp.png)](https://global.discourse-cdn.com/balena/original/2X/1/104853a4c6157bfd9224d00fa6bf5fe0e8523a1a.png "image")

But maybe it doesn’t apply to free accounts?

Thanks again

9

Oh I see.
We do not support device deactivation for starter applications, so this is an interesting edge case.
I create an internal issue for this, thanks for letting us know.

Kind regards,
Thodoris