Product Strategy
Living document. This is the business plan, versioned next to the code and iterated as the product is built. The root README summarizes it. Treat numbers as hypotheses with dates, not facts.
One-line pitch
Section titled “One-line pitch”Fjarr gives robot companies the remote connectivity stack they keep rebuilding — embeddable camera streaming, remote desktop, file transfer and fleet tooling — as open-source libraries plus a managed cloud.
Market hypothesis
Section titled “Market hypothesis”Target customer: robot/IoT product companies (5–200 engineers) without a dedicated connectivity team — AMRs, agriculture, inspection, logistics, outdoor robotics. They all need: live video, remote support access, log/file retrieval, fleet health, OTA. Today they choose between rebuilding it (months, fragile — see prior art) or stitching together tools that don’t embed (RustDesk/AnyDesk for desktop, an IoT cloud for telemetry, scp for files).
Analogous positioning: LiveKit (media infra, open server + cloud twin), Mender/Balena (fleet OTA), Temporal (open core + managed). Fjarr’s differentiator is the bundle for robots: real-time media, desktop, files, and fleet tooling — one protocol, embeddable at every tier.
Open-core split (ADR-0011, ADR-0015)
Section titled “Open-core split (ADR-0011, ADR-0015)”| Free & open (AGPL-3.0) | Paid |
|---|---|
libfjarr agent library + fjarr-agent | Fjarr Cloud: managed signaling + TURN fleet, multi-tenant, metered |
fjarr-signaling crate + fjarr-server sidecar (self-host) | Fleet observability: aggregation, retention, dashboards, alerting (M7) |
@fjarr/core, @fjarr/react | OTA campaigns: staged rollouts, fleet targeting, audit (M8) |
| Protocol spec, SDKs, docs, demos | SSO/SCIM, audit export, support/SLA |
| Commercial license for companies that can’t ship AGPL |
Principles: the open core must be genuinely usable alone (a company can run everything themselves); paid features are things that are inherently hosted-value (aggregation, retention, campaigns, TURN capacity) or enterprise process (SSO, SLA) — never artificial crippling.
Revenue streams
Section titled “Revenue streams”- Fjarr Cloud subscriptions — usage-metered (below).
- Commercial licenses (AGPL exception) — flat per-product/year.
- Support & integration contracts — early revenue while the funnel grows.
Usage meters
Section titled “Usage meters”Meter what tracks our real cost and the customer’s real value:
| Meter | Tracks | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Robots connected / month | fleet size | primary tier axis |
| Session-minutes | operator usage | media plane load |
| TURN relay GB | our bandwidth cost | the natural WebRTC meter; relay-only is common in the field |
| (M7+) metric series retained | storage | observability tier |
| (M8+) OTA campaign devices | campaign scale | OTA tier |
Metering is built into fjarr-server in both editions — billing input in
Cloud, plain observability when self-hosted.
Pricing sketch (hypothesis, revisit at M5)
Section titled “Pricing sketch (hypothesis, revisit at M5)”- Free: self-host everything; Cloud dev tier (≤3 robots, community).
- Team (~€49/robot/mo, decreasing with volume): Cloud signaling + TURN quota + webhooks + basic fleet view.
- Scale (custom): observability + OTA campaigns + SSO + SLA.
- Commercial license (from ~€10k/yr): AGPL exception, self-host.
Go-to-market
Section titled “Go-to-market”- Open-source adoption engine (M0.5→): landing at fjarr.io, honest
docs, the three-demo stack as the “aha” (clone →
make demo-up→ see a robot in a dashboard in minutes). Content: the build-vs-buy engineering story we lived (prior art). - Pilot on Cloud, scale anywhere: because sidecar and Cloud implement the same contract, evaluation friction is near zero and self-host is always available — trust, not lock-in, sells the robots-at-scale tier.
- Design-partner phase (M3–M5): 2–3 robot companies (starting with our own network) integrate free with hands-on help in exchange for roadmap input and case studies.
- Expand per fleet: revenue follows the customer’s fleet growth via the robot/relay meters.
Risks & watch items
Section titled “Risks & watch items”| Risk | Mitigation |
|---|---|
| Big infra player bundles “robot connectivity” | AGPL + move fast on the robot-specific 20% they won’t do (desktop backends, OTA, ROS adapters) |
| AGPL scares embedded legal teams | commercial license path, clean per-file headers, CLA from day one |
| TURN bandwidth cost underestimated | meter from M1; relay GB is priced through |
| Solo-founder bus factor | docs-first development is the mitigation |
Fjarr — Swedish fjärr, “remote”. Chosen 2026-09-15 after an
availability-checked shortlist (styrlina, livlina, servolink, robobridge —
all free; fjarr won on brevity + meaning). Registered same day: domains
fjarr.io + fjarr.dev (Cloudflare), npm org @fjarr, GitHub org
fjarrio (fjarr was taken) connected to crates.io.