On the 4th of September 2024, flespi officially joined the 1 million device platforms club. Here's the video footage of that historical moment:
By the way, if you're curious about the USB dongle with the dashboard in the video, it’s a cheap ($12) yet powerful ESP32-S3 dongle with Tasmota firmware running a script connected to the flespi MQTT Broker and streaming platform status counters in real-time via MQTT.
While it was an amazing achievement—and I woke up the next morning feeling like a millionaire—nothing has actually changed. We're still the same team, working on the same backend, and doing our best every day to simplify telematics and ensure seamless data flow for the hundreds of applications and platforms that rely on us.
Passing the 1 million devices mark was a fantastic and inspirational moment for the whole team. We celebrated with a small cake party at the office, inviting former employees who contributed to this success but have moved on from flespi at some moment.
Thank you, guys, for investing a part of your lifetime in flespi! This milestone of 1 million connected devices is truly a result of our collective teamwork over many years.
We first enabled device registration on flespi in late 2017. It took us five years to reach half a million devices and just two more years to hit the second half. For posterity, I’ll publish a device growth chart:
Franlky speaking, there are still users who use flespi purely as a data hub on the channel level without registering devices. However, we haven’t included them in this count.
I’d also like to express my deep gratitude to the device manufacturers that contributed to this growth. Here’s how the million devices are divided among manufacturers at present:
Thank you, dear partners, for trusting us to deliver data to hundreds of telematics platforms and applications!
And, of course, a huge thank you to the developers and Telematics Service Providers behind these applications and platforms which rely on flespi backend in their data flow. Currently, we’re working with more than 430 companies from 81 countries, with most devices located in Europe and belonging to the U.S.:
Many of these companies use flespi for fleet digitalization, and we see the Transportation industry growing faster than ever.
We love the projects for cold chain monitoring, boats, garbage, and even earthquake sensors. We see quite an amount of Micromobility services mostly for scooter sharing are popping up. Startups focused on electricity and battery tracking are also booming. But the vehicle transportation sector still dominates in telematics—and that’s just a fact. We continue investing time into supporting these small startups, believing that the future of telematics lies beyond just transportation. We're committed to helping bring digital transformation to other industries.
I’d like to point out that despite the volume of devices and customers, the flespi team remains small, flat, and stable. Yes, in 2024, we brought in codi, our AI assistant, which now handles most of our support communication, but even with that, we are not expanding.
It’s the same team that started flespi back in 2015, largely composed of engineers (9 out of 10 in our team). We continue adding features and functionality to flespi, perhaps at a slower pace now due to the greater impact, but the enhancements are broader and more notable — like video telematics and tachography.
To boost team productivity, we’ve developed various tools, standards, and libraries that assist us daily. We maintain a healthy 30-50-20 workload ratio, dedicating 30% to backend improvements, 50% to new internal tools or platform features, and 20% to experimenting with new ideas.
From a platform stability standpoint, we currently have zero known bugs, and overall, the system is even more stable with many minor issues already resolved. Our annual uptime has been in the "four nines" category for four years now.
In the very end, I would like to express my sincere gratitude to Gurtam — a company that backed flespi on its multi-year journey to this first million. Gurtam allowed the flespi team to focus on the product by handling all the complexities of legal, financial, and administrative matters, providing office space and equipment, and kindly offering, like a mother, any assistance our team might need.
Thank you, friends! Here’s to the next million!