Cost Comparison of Five IoT Platforms
As the development of the Internet of Things enters a mature stage, more and more enterprises choose the Internet of Things PaaS services provided by cloud vendors to reduce operating costs, shorten the business launch cycle, release manpower for operation and maintenance, and dynamically expand capacity on demand. Based on the official website quotations of various cloud vendors in April 2023, the author sorted out the costs of the five major domestic IoT platforms for your reference.
Business scene:
Assume that the enterprise has 10,000 devices, which are online for 12 hours a day, and an average of 1 message (message body <1KB) is sent every 5 minutes, and all of them are transferred to the message queue Kafka to realize peak-shaving and valley-filling, avoiding the impact of message floods on the back-end system .
The cost assessment comparison is as follows:
IoT cloud product cost assessment details
▌AWS China Internet of Things Cost Accounting
The Amazon Pricing Calculator provides an estimate of the cost of Amazon cloud technology, which is convenient for enterprise developers to estimate the cost of using IoT Core.
https://calculator.amazonaws.cn/#/addService/IoTCore?trk=pricing-ban
Connection minutes cost (monthly): 157.68 CNY
21,900 minutes per month x 0.00000072 CNY x 10,000 devices = 157.68 CNY per month
Message fee (monthly): 387.50 CNY
1 Size of each message (KB) / 5 KB message increment = 0.20 number of messages
round(0.2) = 1 billable message
4,320 monthly messages x 1 billable messages x 10,000 devices = 43,200,000 total billable messages
Tiered price for: 43200000 messages
43200000 messages x 0.0000089700 CNY = 387.50 CNY
Rules engine cost (monthly): 116.64 CNY
1 Size of each message (KB) / 5 KB message increment = 0.20 number of messages
round(0.2) = 1 billable message
4,320 rules executed per month x 1 billable message = 4,320 total billable rules
1 actions triggered per rule x 4,320 rules executed per month x 1 billable messages = 4,320 total billable actions
4,320 monthly rules x 0.00000135 CNY x 10,000 devices = 58.32 CNY (rules)
4,320 monthly operations x 0.00000135 CNY x 10,000 devices = 58.32 CNY (operations)
Total Fee = 58.32 CNY + 58.32 CNY = 116.64 CNY
▌Alibaba cloud IoT cost accounting
Alibaba Cloud does not provide a pricing calculator for IoT cloud products, so we estimate the cost from the product purchase page.
https://common-buy.aliyun.com/?&commodityCode=iot_instc_public_cn
Concurrent online devices (monthly): ¥614.00
Message uplink and downlink TPS (monthly): ¥653.00
Message forwarding TPS (monthly): ¥73.00
▌HUAWEI CLOUD IoT Cost Accounting
The HUAWEI CLOUD Product Price Calculator provides enterprise developers with a simple, transparent, fair, and predictable visual interface for price evaluation.
https://www.huaweicloud.com/pricing.html#/iothub
Compared with AWS China and Alibaba Cloud, HUAWEI CLOUD Internet of Things only charges TPS fees for uplink and downlink of messages. We guess there are two possibilities. One may be the display problem of the front-end price calculator page; the other may be the public cloud enterprise customers of HUAWEI CLOUD Rarely, private cloud project delivery is the main focus, so the pricing granularity is very extensive and has little impact on revenue.
▌Tencent Cloud Internet of Things Cost Accounting
Tencent Cloud also provides cloud product price evaluation calculators for enterprise developers.
https://buy.cloud.tencent.com/iotexplorer
Tencent Cloud IoT is billed according to the number of devices and the number of messages , and each device has a free quota of 2,000 messages per day (messages are counted as "each message content length/512Bytes" rounded up). When your equipment data reporting frequency is high (interval less than 1 minute) business scenarios, the overall cost will increase, which is more suitable for enterprise data collection scenarios with low frequency (interval greater than 1 minute).
Our device reports 1 collection of data every 5 minutes, the size of which is 1KB. Converted to Tencent Cloud billing, each device has a total of 288 records per day, which is still within the free quota, so the message fee is 0 yuan.
The cost of equipment is 866 yuan per month.
▌China Mobile OneNET IoT cost accounting
China Mobile's OneNET platform is backed by the world's largest operator and has strong financial strength to provide free IoT cloud services for a large number of enterprises, benefiting domestic start-ups and small enterprises, and as an infrastructure provider, it takes on the important task of domestic economic revitalization.
Summarize
AWS China provides enterprises with a pay-as-you-go model, which has the best overall cost; Alibaba Cloud’s yearly and monthly subscription model is more suitable for 24-hour equipment online scenarios, and insufficient online time will cause part of the cost of the enterprise to be wasted; Huawei Cloud has a large limit on the amount of messages , Enterprise architects need to pay attention to the impact on business; Tencent Cloud has free message quota, which is suitable for low-frequency interaction scenarios; China Mobile OneNET is suitable for start-ups that are cost-sensitive and require low data reliability.
As an Internet of Things practitioner, besides the price factor, what aspects do you pay attention to, and how to choose a suitable cloud vendor? Welcome to leave a message to exchange!
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