Your sensor project shouldn't expire mid-month.
You wire up an ESP32, get it posting readings, and it works — for a while. Then the free tier's message quota runs dry and the dashboard goes flat. Or you finish setting up the web dashboard and discover the phone app needs the same widgets configured all over again, separately. The hardware was the easy part.
Nodik is the boring fix for both. One dashboard — build it once, and it's already on your phone, because it's the same app. No message quota to watch: your devices report on a fixed refresh rate and keep reporting. Four devices free, no card, and a working sketch generated for your exact sensor if you want one.
Hobby plan: 4 devices, updating every 15s, $0 forever. Nothing expires.
The three things that make people give up
Not the soldering. These.
On some platforms the web dashboard and the mobile dashboard are separate
builds — you define your data streams once, then lay out widgets in the
browser, then lay them out again in the app, from a different
widget list. Two layouts to keep in sync, and they drift.
→ Nodik has one dashboard. It's a web app that
installs to your home screen. What you build on the laptop is what's on
the phone, because it is the same thing.
Message-metered free tiers punish exactly the projects worth building. A
device sending a handful of fields every few seconds burns an allowance
far faster than the monthly number suggests, and when it runs out the
graph just stops.
→ Nodik meters refresh rate, not messages. Hobby
devices update every 15 seconds, indefinitely. Nothing to run out of, and
nothing to top up.
Wiring a DHT22 is twenty minutes. Writing the sketch that authenticates,
reconnects after a dropout, reads a command back from the dashboard and
fails safe when the sensor dies is a weekend.
→ Describe your project, get a sketch. Nodik's
generator writes it around a tested scaffold — reconnect handling,
token refresh, a manual/auto override that doesn't fight itself, and a
sensor failsafe. Paste, fill in your Wi-Fi, flash.
Running in about ten minutes
No broker to configure, no certificates to generate.
- Add a device. You get a device ID and a token — the token is shown once.
- Flash the sketch. Use your own, or describe what you're building and let Nodik write it. Paste in your Wi-Fi and the two values from step one.
- Watch it appear. Readings land on the dashboard live. Drop in gauges, charts, toggles and sliders; set alert rules that push to your phone.
Works with ESP32, ESP8266, Raspberry Pi Pico W and any board that can make an HTTPS request.
What you get
The free tier is a real tier, not a countdown.
| Plan | Devices at full speed | Refresh | AI |
|---|---|---|---|
| Hobby · $0 | 4 | every 15s | — |
| Maker · $6/mo | 12 | every 8s | Ask Nodik AI |
| Creator · $18/mo | 16 | every 4s | Ask AI + firmware generator |
Add more devices than your plan's full-speed count and they keep working — the refresh rate paces out gradually rather than the device being blocked. Alerts, history, charts and the mobile install are on every plan, including free.
Built around real hardware
Nodik came out of wanting better monitoring for equipment on a farm in Assam — water levels, pump state, dry-run protection. That's why the failsafe advice is baked into the generated firmware and why the docs keep saying it out loud: Nodik is a monitoring and convenience layer, not a certified safety system. Put your interlocks on the device. Use the dashboard to know what happened.
Alerts that reach you
Threshold rules per field, delivered as push notifications to your phone or desktop — including when the app is closed.
History and charts
Readings are stored and charted per device, so “when did it last run?” has an answer.
Two-way control
Toggles and sliders send commands back to the board. Your firmware decides what to do with them.
Four devices, free, no card.
If it doesn't fit, nothing was spent finding out.