If you want to use some Cloud service in freeware mode, I would particularly choose the 2nd option, since many of these brokers impose a time window (ex.: 15s for ThingSpeak) in this modal, so that in case there is more than one remote device acting as client per account, this would generate conflict between them, so the suited approach should be: All other devices locally reporting to only one of them, which would act as the 'interlocutor' to the external server.