IoT platform pricing looks simple until you put two vendors side by side. One charges per device, another per message, a third per user, and the fourth just says "contact sales." The number that decides your budget is not the one on the pricing page — it is what you actually pay in month six, with the sensors you actually installed, once the alerts and the extra dashboards and the second site are switched on. This guide explains how IoT platform pricing works, which costs sit outside the subscription, and what a realistic monthly bill looks like at 5, 100 and 500 devices.

What Is Included in IoT Platform Pricing?

Nearly every IoT platform prices on some combination of five things. Knowing which ones a vendor meters tells you more than the headline price does.

Connected devices — the most common unit, and usually the one the plan is named after. Watch the definition: some vendors count a gateway as a device, some count each sensor channel separately.

Data volume — messages, data points, or gigabytes ingested. Precise, and the least predictable, because it moves the moment somebody changes a reporting interval from once an hour to once a minute.

Dashboards and users — how many custom views you can build, and whether every colleague who needs to look at one costs money.

Automation rules — how many rules, thresholds and escalation chains you can run at once. On a real deployment this number grows faster than the device count.

History — how long readings and logs stay queryable. Retention is the quietest of the five and the one that hurts most in an audit, when you need last winter's temperature record and it expired.

Why Do IoT Platforms Charge Per Device?

Because it is the only unit both sides can predict. You know how many sensors you are mounting; the vendor knows roughly what it costs to keep them connected, stored and evaluated. Nobody has to guess.

Message-based metering is more honest in theory — you pay for what you use — and far worse to budget with. A firmware update that doubles reporting frequency, a decoder change, or one chatty sensor model can multiply the bill without anyone making a purchasing decision. If a platform meters data, get the definition in writing: what counts as a message, whether downlinks count, and what happens when you cross the line — a hard stop, throttling, or an automatic upgrade.

Per-seat pricing is the model to look at hardest, because it charges you for the behavior you actually want. Monitoring pays off when the caretaker, the facility manager and the person on call can all see the same screen. A platform that bills per user quietly discourages exactly that.

Is There a Free IoT Platform?

There are two different free options, and they are not comparable.

Open-source platforms you host yourself have no license fee. The software is free; the deployment is not. You are paying in servers, database storage, upgrades, backups, TLS certificates and somebody's time when it breaks at the weekend. That trade is worth it when you have an ops team and want full control. It is a poor trade when you have five sensors and no in-house IT.

Vendor free tiers are usually trials with a clock on them. The ones worth taking seriously are the ones that do not expire and do not ask for a card. Kilo's free tier is 5 devices, one dashboard and one rule, with one day of log retention — the full platform rather than a limited demo, with no payment details and no end date. It is enough to put real sensors on real dashboards and see whether the thing works for you before any money moves.

What Are the Hidden Costs of an IoT Platform?

The subscription is rarely the whole bill. Six things to ask about before you compare prices:

The network server. If you are deploying LoRaWAN sensors, something has to run the network server. With some stacks that is a second subscription, or a server you operate yourself. With others it is built in and included — on Kilo it is part of the platform, and so is the mioty service center.

Gateways. Ask directly whether a gateway consumes a device slot. On Kilo it never does: gateways are unlimited on every tier including Free, and they do not count toward the subscription, so covering a second building does not cost a device.

Seats. Whether adding the fifth colleague changes the price.

Retention upgrades. The cheapest plan usually keeps the least history, and history is what audits, warranty claims and insurance conversations run on.

Alert credits. SMS and voice notifications are often billed separately from the plan — on Kilo, SMS is a purchasable add-on rather than something bundled into the monthly fee.

Setup. The traditional IoT project spends most of its budget before the first reading arrives: integrator time, configuration, commissioning. This is the line item that changed most in the last two years, because an AI-first platform can do the configuration work that used to be quoted in weeks.

How Much Does It Cost to Monitor 100 Sensors?

Concrete numbers, using published prices rather than a range.

At 5 devices — a pilot, one building, a few leak sensors and a temperature probe — €0 per month on Kilo's free tier. At 25 devices, €25 per month. At 100 devices, €145 per month, with up to 50 custom dashboards, 150 rules and a month of log retention. At 500 devices across a portfolio, €379 per month with 12 months of retention. Gateways are unlimited at every one of those steps, and there are no per-user fees at any of them.

The hardware is separate and it is a one-off, not a subscription: the sensors themselves and at least one gateway, bought once and typically running for years on their own batteries. Budget it as capital expenditure alongside the monthly platform cost, and remember that one gateway usually covers a whole building — often several.

Which IoT Platform Pricing Model Works Best at Scale?

Model month twelve, not month one. Take the deployment you expect to have after a year — devices, sites, people who need access, rules, and how long you must keep the data — and price that on every candidate. Pilots are cheap everywhere; the models separate at scale.

Three questions that settle most comparisons: What exactly is metered, in writing? What happens when a limit is crossed? And does the price go up when more of my team starts using it?

Then test the answer with real hardware rather than a spreadsheet. Put five sensors on a free tier, build the dashboard you would actually use, set the rule that would actually wake somebody up, and see what it costs to keep. You can start free at app.kiloiot.io with no card, see the full plan limits at kiloiot.io/iot-server/, and if you run multiple sites or have no in-house IT team, book a call and we will scope it with you.