Total Cost of Ownership
IoT solution Cost
Before you start development, it is good to calculate the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) over the period you expect your IoT solution to be in the market.
The TCO has three main cost drivers:
- Development
- Monitoring & Maintenance
- Operations & Hosting
Development
An IoT solution consists of many components, among others, electronics, mechanics, embedded software, cloud software, and user interfaces.
Furthermore, the final product must be certified according to existing standards such as RED, FCC, or TÜV before you can sell it.
When using an experienced partner, you can avoid pitfalls that will drive costs up during the development phase.
Monitoring & Maintenance
An IoT solution should have a high degree of availability. If your servers are down, and your customers can therefore not use their systems, you will get bad press.
In our Wappsto solution we are constantly monitoring our infrastructure and get alerted when there are problems.
We have 4 parallel systems running. One for development, one for quality assurance, a production system and a staging system for hot-fixes.
Operations & Hosting
No matter what you use, your servers, a cloud provider, or our Wappsto SaaS solution, you will incur the cost for this infrastructure.
After all, this infrastructure needs electricity, internet, new hard drives, new servers, etc.
It is essential to realize that even though you choose a cloud hosting provider, you still need to monitor and update your system on a regular basis.