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Fostrom, an IoT Cloud Platform built for developers

Details

External ID
47084431
Source
HN
Company
—
Product
Fostrom, an IoT Cloud Platform built for developers
Website domain
fostrom.io
Launched
Feb. 20, 2026
Cohort
—
Upvotes
13
Upvotes percentile
0.6152291105121294
Tags
—
Fetched at
Sept. 7, 2026, 9:25 p.m.
Updated at
Sept. 7, 2026, 9:25 p.m.

Description

Hey HN! Arjun and Sid here.Fostrom is an IoT Cloud Platform designed for developers to make it really easy to get started and scale fleets. We have Device SDKs (in Python, JS, Elixir, more coming soon), Typed Schemas, Per-Device Mailboxes, Programmable Actions, 4 Global Regions for lower-latency connections, and much more.We've built Fostrom to solve a real need we faced in our previous startup, building a fully automated indoor vertical farm. We spent more time figuring out IoT infrastructure than writing automation logic. Fostrom is the platform we wished existed back then.Over the last few years we've experimented with a lot of interesting tech and architectures, and settled on an architecture that we believe is quite elegant. We wrote a Go<->Elixir bridge to execute JS code in WASM for Actions, implemented a DuckDB library for Elixir, and wrote a Device Agent in Rust that our SDKs run in the background (https://github.com/fostrom/devicekit).The most interesting realization we had was about the data architecture. For years, we tried using distributed databases and built complex layers on top of them, but all approaches had significant limitations specifically around consistency and querying. We want to provide operational correctness, rich insights, and reliability. Finally, we came to the conclusion that to achieve this we really need a SQL database for fleet data. So we built a DuckDB-based replicated multi-tenant data layer. We're still improving it (hence the Technical Preview badge) but we're quite proud of this decision. It simplifies the rest of the codebase, while keeping operational complexity in just a few places.Our vision is to make a powerful IoT platform that enables you to build correct, secure, and reliable connected systems without dealing with any of the plumbing or infrastructure.Next up, we're gonna launch our CLI, add automatic device monitoring to our Device SDKs, and improve the debugging experience. We have some pretty cool ideas to make Fostrom and the experience of developing connected systems better. We're also going to write more about our architecture and journey soon.We also published our launch blog post which goes into more detail about our vision, what we've built, and our future plans: https://fostrom.io/blog/introducing-fostromWould love for you to try out Fostrom and give us your feedback and thoughts.

Enrichment

Theme
database infrastructure and developer tools
Vertical
Horizontal
Function
Data infrastructure
Audience
Developer
AI stance
Not AI
Project type
Commercial product
Normalized one-liner
iot cloud platform for developers
Manually corrected
False

Could you build this?

No An industrial IoT platform requires high-throughput MQTT/HTTP ingestion brokers, distributed multi-region state synchronization, deterministic per-device queue semantics, and isolated multi-tenant code execution sandboxes.

What it would actually take: A scalable IoT platform needs an Erlang/Elixir (EMQX) or Rust/Go message broker cluster distributed across regions, backed by time-series databases (TimescaleDB/ClickHouse) and transactional stores for mailbox states. The difficult components include low-latency device connection pooling, guaranteed at-least-once ordered mailbox queues with backpressure, and a secure V8 isolate runtime for running user JavaScript actions in real time. This requires an experienced distributed systems and infrastructure engineering team.

Discussion

8 comments analyzed.

Competitors mentioned: Google Cloud IoT Core, Golioth, Home Assistant

Concerns raised: Vendor lock-in and platform shutdowns, Custom protocols create vendor dependence, Poor developer experience and documentation in IoT space, Industrial IoT lacks polished out-of-box user experience

Feature requests: Open source device-side tooling and self-hosting options, Automatic telemetry collection and tracing support, Quick integration examples across different hardware and protocols, Standardized protocols instead of proprietary SDKs

Competitors

Other products that read as similar to this one — 41 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.

Attention rank: #20 of 42 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).

Launched 113 days after the earliest competitor.

Other launches for this product

Same idea, different domain

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