Live · free accounts open
Send it to the lad.
The simplest way to put a sensor on the internet. One HTTP line from any device. A live chart you can share with a link, no account needed to view.
Signup is self-serve: enter an email, click the link we send, and your first write key is waiting. No password, no credit card.
How it works
Three steps, and the third one is optional.
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1
Send
One HTTP GET from anything that can reach the internet — ESP32, ESP8266, Raspberry Pi, a shell script, a PLC, a phone. No SDK, no client library, no auth header, no MQTT broker to stand up.
GET api.postlad.com/u?k=KEY&f1=23.5&f2=61Not sure what to put on the board? Set up a device writes the whole program for your board and sensor, wiring included.
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2
Watch
The stream gets a live page the moment the first reading lands. Current value, chart, last-seen time. Nothing to lay out, nothing to configure, no dashboard to build first.
app.postlad.com/s/greenhouse -
3
Share & embed
Send anyone the link — viewers need no account, no login, no app. Or drop the chart straight into a blog post, a lab wiki or a class page with one line of HTML, as a script tag or an iframe. Embeds on the free tier carry a small Postlad badge.
<iframe src="app.postlad.com/e/greenhouse">
Why bother building this
Because free tiers for hobbyists have quietly collapsed. A data logger that forgets everything after a day isn’t a data logger — and a season of greenhouse readings currently has nowhere free to live.
| Platform | Free-tier history | Device can write with a plain HTTP GET |
|---|---|---|
| Postlad | 30 days at full detail, then hourly min/max/avg to 12 months | Yes |
| Arduino Cloud | 1 day | not compared |
| Blynk | 1 week | not compared |
| Adafruit IO | 30 days | No — POST plus an auth header |
| ThingSpeak | Works, but throttled to one write per 15 seconds, and the free licence is non-commercial only | Yes |
| Grafana Cloud | not compared | No — a device can’t write to it at all |
Last checked August 2026. Postlad is live: HTTP GET ingest, public share links, embeds and CSV export all work today, a stream keeps every reading at full detail for 30 days, and the hourly rollup engine behind the 12-month figure is running — though Postlad is new enough that no stream has a full year in it yet. Cells marked not compared are things we haven’t verified ourselves, so we don’t claim them — if you know better, tell us and we’ll fix the row.
The free tier, in full
No trial clock, no credit card, no “contact us”. This is the plan, written down now so it can be held against us later. All six lines below are switched on — the three that used to be marked as unbuilt shipped in August 2026.
- 2 streams
- One update every 5 seconds, and 100,000 stored points a month
- Every reading at full detail for 30 days, then an hourly minimum, maximum and average for 12 months — after that it is deleted
- Public share links — viewers need no account
- Embeds for blogs, wikis and class pages — free-tier embeds carry a small Postlad badge
- CSV export — every tier, no cap
Your data is yours. The export button is right there on the stream page.
Create your free account
Signup is self-serve and takes about a minute. Enter your email, click the link we send back, and you land on your streams with a write key already minted — no password to choose, no credit card, no “contact us”. No newsletter and no drip campaign either; we email you about your account and nothing else.
- Enter an email at app.postlad.com/login
- Click the magic link we send — that is the whole login
- Copy your write key and paste it into the GET line above
Free tier as written above, and it stays free. Something broken or missing? hello@postlad.com reaches a person.