u/Inevitable-Fault-748

Rant incoming but also genuinely looking for advice.

I've got a few ESP32 projects around the house — plant monitors, desk sensors. Used to tie them all together with Blynk. It was imperfect but it worked.

Now the free tier is basically useless for anything real, and paying for their enterprise plans for personal hobby stuff feels absurd.

What's actually good right now? My requirements are pretty simple:

Works over direct BLE (no broker, no cloud middleman)

Can visualize sensor data — not just send commands

Doesn't need me to flash a proprietary library to every device

Offline first — no internet required

Is anyone building their own companion apps? Using nRF Connect creatively? Self-hosting something?

Or is the honest answer that nothing good exists yet and someone needs to build it?

Rant incoming but also genuinely looking for advice.

I've got a few ESP32 projects around the house — plant monitors, desk sensors, a garage door controller. Used to tie them all together with Blynk. It was imperfect but it worked.

Now the free tier is basically useless for anything real, and paying for their enterprise plans for personal hobby stuff feels absurd.

What's actually good right now? My requirements are pretty simple:

Works over direct BLE (no broker, no cloud middleman)

Can visualize sensor data — not just send commands

Doesn't need me to flash a proprietary library to every device

Offline first — my garage ESP32 shouldn't need internet to work

Is anyone building their own companion apps? Using nRF Connect creatively? Self-hosting something?

Or is the honest answer that nothing good exists yet and someone needs to build it?