Work out iot data cost per device instantly with clear inputs, formula shown and shareable results.
Cellular IoT cost is a subscription plus metered data, and the subscription usually dominates for small telemetry payloads. Protocol overhead — TCP/TLS handshakes, headers and keepalives — often exceeds the payload itself, so an allowance of 50-100% over raw payload is realistic.
IoT data cost
MB/month = messages/day x (payload + overhead) x 30.44 / 1e6; cost = MB x rate + subscription
A TLS handshake alone is several kilobytes. Keeping a session alive or using DTLS session resumption is essential when payloads are only a hundred bytes.
Message frequency first, then payload encoding (CBOR or protobuf over JSON), then batching several readings into one transmission.