Hey HN,

I’m the co-founder and CEO of Kaiterra, a company that's been on a crazy journey with IAQ (Indoor Air Quality) sensors. I feel like you all might appreciate the story and the outcome: amazing hardware at whatever price you want to pay. If you like economic experiments, read on!

Back in 2014, before air quality was a (somewhat) mainstream topic, we were building some of the first sensors and monitors out there. Some of you might remember our first consumer product, the Laser Egg. We were the first HomeKit-enabled air monitor, the top pick on Wirecutter, and were sold in Apple Stores. This happened when our company only had 6 people!

A few years ago, we pivoted to B2B, focusing on helping Fortune 100s and large-scale building operators with automation and IAQ compliance. That pivot is a story for another day!

Recently, we began supporting the Global IAQ Observatory research project. There is a massive data gap in air quality research that a group of experts is trying to bridge. There are strong regulations around the water and food we consume, but the air in buildings and public spaces (where we spend 90% of our time) is often a total black box. Researchers are working to collect the data needed to eventually drive evidence-based policy.

While the primary research focuses on public buildings, offices, and schools, we've decided to help contribute anonymized residential data. This data is messier but is highly representative of what people are actually breathing.

We decided to make our main Enterprise B2B sensor (the Sensedge Mini) available for everyone to use at home, on the condition that the data can be used for research in an entirely anonymized and aggregated way.

The Hardware (Sensedge Mini):

Sensors: Commercial-grade PM2.5, CO2, TVOC, Temperature, and Humidity. Connectivity: Ethernet and WiFi, supports MQTT, Modbus, and BACnet/IP. Data Access: There is an Open API. You can send the data to your own local servers/dashboards while simultaneously contributing to the research database.

The Economic Experiment: Pay What You Want (PWYW) We’ve decided to distribute these using a PWYW model. Honestly, this is probably the most interesting thing for me :). We are making these devices available at literally "whatever price you want". Yes, even $0.

We want to ensure that researchers or students on a budget aren't barred from participating.

The Scaling Logic: We have a finite pool of devices allocated for this. If everyone takes the $0 scholarship, we can only put a limited number of monitors into the world. If participants choose to pay closer to market value, that revenue goes directly into funding more hardware, allowing us to scale the study from a few hundred homes to thousands.

Our goal is to create a global public good: a comprehensive, open-access dataset that can accelerate the transition to healthier indoor environments worldwide.

If you want to pick up a monitor, here's the link: https://kaiterra.com/citizen-science (we reset the number of $0 monitors each day to make sure we don't get totally overwhelmed)

I'm here to answer questions!

Submissions

Show HN: B2B air monitors as "Pay What You Want" for a global study:)

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