How Much Does an IoT Platform Cost on AWS, Azure, or GCP?
An IoT platform costs $30-$100/mo at 100 devices and $800-$3,000/mo at 10,000 devices. Message ingestion pricing differs sharply by provider — AWS IoT Core charges per-message while Azure IoT Hub charges per-unit — so device count and reporting frequency matter more than provider choice.
IoT platforms ingest telemetry from thousands of devices, process events in real-time, and store time-series data. AWS IoT Core, Azure IoT Hub, and Google Cloud IoT price per-message and per-device differently. Use our calculator to compare IoT infrastructure costs across all three providers for your device fleet.
IoT Platform Architecture
A production IoT platform requires a device gateway (MQTT broker) for secure device connections, a message ingestion layer for handling telemetry at scale, stream processing for real-time event detection and transformation, a time-series database for storing and querying sensor data, device management for provisioning and firmware updates, and alerting for threshold-based notifications. Message volume scales linearly with device count multiplied by reporting frequency.
IoT Messaging Costs
AWS IoT Core charges approximately $1 per million messages. Azure IoT Hub charges $10/month per unit, where each unit supports 400K messages/day. GCP deprecated Cloud IoT Core — the current approach uses Pub/Sub directly at $40/TiB of message data. At 10,000 devices sending telemetry every minute, that is 14.4 million messages per day. The choice between providers depends heavily on message size and frequency patterns specific to your device fleet.
IoT Cost Scaling
At 100 devices, a basic IoT platform costs $30–$100/month with managed messaging and a small time-series database. At 1,000 devices, expect $150–$500/month as stream processing and larger storage become necessary. At 10,000 devices, costs range from $800–$3,000/month with dedicated ingestion infrastructure. Time-series storage (InfluxDB, TimescaleDB, or cloud-native options) becomes the dominant cost at scale. Edge processing reduces cloud costs by filtering and aggregating data locally before transmission.
Key Cost Factors
- Message ingestion: IoT Core/IoT Hub/Pub/Sub fees
- Stream processing: Real-time event detection
- Time-series database: Telemetry storage and queries
- Device management: Provisioning and firmware updates
- Object storage: Historical data archival
- Alerting: Threshold monitoring and notifications
Frequently Asked Questions
How much does an IoT platform cost on AWS vs Azure vs GCP?
AWS IoT Core charges approximately $1 per million messages, Azure IoT Hub charges $10/month per unit supporting 400K messages/day, and GCP's current approach uses Pub/Sub directly at $40/TiB of message data since Cloud IoT Core was deprecated. At 100 devices, expect $30-$100/month. At 1,000 devices, costs run $150-$500/month, and at 10,000 devices, expect $800-$3,000/month with dedicated ingestion infrastructure.
What is the cheapest cloud provider for an IoT platform?
It depends heavily on message size and frequency. AWS IoT Core's per-message pricing favors fleets sending small, infrequent messages, while Azure IoT Hub's per-unit model can be more predictable for fleets with steady high-volume traffic. Since GCP now routes IoT through Pub/Sub rather than a dedicated IoT service, its cost structure is closer to a general messaging bill than a purpose-built device pricing model.
What drives the cost of an IoT platform?
Message ingestion fees scale directly with device count multiplied by reporting frequency, making it the primary cost driver. Time-series database storage becomes the dominant cost at scale as historical telemetry accumulates. Stream processing for real-time event detection, device management for provisioning and firmware updates, and alerting for threshold monitoring round out the remaining spend. Edge processing that filters and aggregates data locally before transmission can meaningfully reduce cloud costs.
How accurate are these IoT cost estimates?
Estimates use published on-demand list prices for AWS IoT Core, Azure IoT Hub, and GCP Pub/Sub in US regions, last verified 2026-07-15. Actual costs depend heavily on message payload size and how much processing happens at the edge before data reaches the cloud, which this calculator can't observe directly. See /methodology for the full assumptions.