# OVERVIEW

## What is Thinger.io?

Thinger.io is a cloud IoT Platform that provides every needed tool to prototype, scale and manage connected products in a very simple way. Our goal is to democratize the use of IoT, making it accessible to the entire world and streamlining the development of large-scale IoT projects. 

* **Free IoT platform**: Thinger.io offers a lifetime freemium account with a few limitations for learning and prototyping. When a product is ready to scale, a Premium Server with full capacity can be deployed within minutes.
* **Simple but Powerful**: Just a couple of code lines to connect a device and start retrieving data or controlling its functionalities with our web-based Console, able to connect and manage thousands of devices in a simple way.
* **Hardware agnostic:** Any device from any manufacturer can be easily integrated with Thinger.io's infrastructure.
* **Extremely scalable & efficient infrastructure:** thanks to our unique communication paradigm, in which the IoT **server subscribes device resources** to retrieve data only when it is necessary, a single Thinger.io instance is able to manage thousands of IoT devices with low computational load, bandwidth and latencies. 
* **Open-Source**: most of the platform modules, libraries and app source code are available in our Github repository to be downloaded and modified with the MIT license. 

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Sign-up [**HERE** ](https://console.thinger.io/#/signup)to obtain a **free account** and start creating IoT projects within minutes!
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### Thinger.io Main Features

Thinger.io platform is formed by two main products: a Backend (which is the actual IoT server) and a web-based Frontend that simplifies working with all the features using any computer or smartphone. The main features provided by this platform to create IoT projects are:

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* **Connect devices:** Fully compatible with every kind of device, no matter the processor, the network or the manufacturer. Thinger.io allows creating **bidirectional communications** with Linux, Arduino, Raspberry Pi, or MQTT devices and even with edge technologies like Sigfox or LoRaWAN or other internet API data resources.&#x20;
* **Store Device Data:** Just a couple of clicks to create a Data Bucket a store IoT data in a scalable, efficient and affordable way, that also allows real-time data aggregation.&#x20;
* **Display Real-time** or **Stored Data** in multiple widgets such as time series, donut charts, gauges, or even custom-made representations to create awesome dashboards within minutes.&#x20;
* **Trigger events and data values** using an embedded Node-RED rule engine.
* **Extend with custom features** with multiple plugins to integrate IoT projects into the company's software or any other third-party Internet service. &#x20;
* **Customize the appearance** thanks to our fully rebrandable frontend, which allows introducing the company´s branding colors, logotypes and web domain.

Ready to start creating IoT projects? [**Create a free account**](https://console.thinger.io/signup) and learn below how to use all this technology.