Thanks for the mention! I'm an employee at Particle, and this is exactly it. I'll be honest and say that dealing with carriers sucks. If you want to bring your IoT device to market, you want to focus on building that device — not negotiating with AT&T or Verizon. We protect our users from that so you can focus on your core competencies and shipping your products.

We leverage our large deployed base of devices for negotiations in a way that you cannot if you are a single IoT business. We've actually had customers use Particle, decide they wanted to do their own thing for cost/complexity reasons, start a relationship with the carriers, and come running back because it was intractable for them.

Valid point. I mean this kills their connectivity offering, which in my AT&T example was the core thing. Sounds like Particle now treats connectivity as a commodity and focuses on the platform. Good decision.