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IoT Data Cost Per Device Calculator

Work out iot data cost per device instantly with clear inputs, formula shown and shareable results.

About IoT Data Cost Per Device Calculator

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.

Formula

IoT data cost

MB/month = messages/day x (payload + overhead) x 30.44 / 1e6; cost = MB x rate + subscription

Worked example

With the default values below, IoT Data Cost Per Device Calculator returns Monthly cost per device of $0.5762. Change any input above and every figure here is recalculated in your browser.

Inputs used

Messages per day
288 msg/day
Payload size
120 bytes
Data price per MB
0.08
Monthly subscription per device
0.45

Results

Monthly cost per device
$0.5762
Data per month
1.58 MB
Data element of the cost
$0.1262
Annual cost for 1000 devices
$6,914.89

Step by step

  1. 1Values used
  2. 2IoT data cost
  3. 3Monthly cost per device= 0.5762
  4. 4Data per month= 1.58 MB
  5. 5Data element of the cost= 0.1262
  6. 6Annual cost for 1000 devices= 6,914.89

Assumptions and limits

  • The result is derived only from the 4 inputs listed above. Anything not among them is not part of the calculation.
  • In particular, this calculator does not take inflation, tax or compounding frequency into account.
  • Figures are rounded for display to 4 decimal places, so totals built from several rounded parts can differ slightly from the unrounded arithmetic.

How these calculators are built and tested is described on the Methodology page. If a figure looks wrong, please report it.

Frequently Asked Questions

Why is overhead so large?

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.

Where should I optimise?

Message frequency first, then payload encoding (CBOR or protobuf over JSON), then batching several readings into one transmission.

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