Getting Started nrf9160 - a bunch of questions

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Hello and thanks in advance for the help.

I spent a number of months designing around another product (Blues.io) and while I was developing my app they decided to add an “event charge” which rendered my use case un economic. Or I think it did: I can’t figure out how to estimate costs with them so who knows.

I have been looking around and discovered the nrf9160 and the Thing Plus. It seems that I should order an NRF DK for debugging. In the article I say they suggest the NRF5340-DK, but I came across the nRF9160-DK, which is much more expensive but also comes with an nrf9160 so having a second platform might be useful. Some of my questions are about the nrf9160-DK so if anybody knows a Nordic Forum I’d appreciate knowing about it. Nordic Developer zone seems to be more of a formal place.

  1. Can I use the nrf9160-DK to program the Thing Plus? (it seems to have the programmer so I assume so)

  2. I do not understand how approvals with with LTE. If I use a Thing Plus, or later an nrf9160 (either the module or an M.2 card) do I have to get approval/permission to connect to the carrier’s network?

  3. What got me with Blues.io was that I had to connect to their cloud service, meaning they could charge whatever they wanted. Looking at the nrf9160-DK getting started information they talk about “Nordic Cloud” but I don’t see a similar thing for the Thing Plus. Can I connect to any cloud service (I saw Amazon listed as supported)?

  4. Does anybody know the costs of Nordic Cloud?

  5. Finally, I would like to estimate the costs of a simple application. Imagine I wanted to send my location every 5 minutes. How much data (all in) would this use? What would be the latency from the time I took a fix until the time it ended up in my app?

Thanks.