IoT Project Cost Estimator
Setting an accurate budget for your IoT hardware initiative is an extremely important early step. The IoT Project Cost Estimator has been prepared through assessing hundreds of IoT hardware projects across dozens of IoT services companies.
How Much Does it Cost to Build Your IoT Product?
Welcome to the Ioterra IoT Project Cost Estimator. This free and easy-to-use tool takes just 5-10 minutes and will help estimate the costs and timeline for you to build your IoT product.
How to use Ioterra’s IoT calculator
The IoT Project Cost Estimator assesses three core areas of your IoT hardware project – electronics development, mechanical development, and firmware development. If your IoT initiative doesn’t have all of these elements, you can skip the irrelevant sections. Each section has approximately five multiple choice questions. Some of the questions may be challenging, but answer them questions as best you can to receive the most accurate answer. You can answer “not sure” on most questions, but this will widen the range of your estimate (e.g. increase the gap between your low-side and high-side estimates).
Do be aware that as the IoT Project Cost Estimator only assesses a few areas of IoT product development, your full initiative cost will be higher than estimated here. In future releases we will be adding more to the IoT Project Cost Estimator to allow it to include software development, app development, and network infrastructure development.
Calculating Possible IoT Cost Savings
Another way that the IoT Project Cost Estimator can be used is to run various permutations of your IoT concept to see how specific modifications affect the overall project cost. For example if you wanted to understand the cost implication of adding certain sensors to your design, or of waterproofing your product, or of optimizing for the longest possible battery life, you can easily get a sense of this by running the IoT Project Cost Estimator multiple times. So that you don’t need to fill out the full estimator each time, after you complete an estimate you can click “Edit My IoT Estimate” in the results screen to go back and only adjust specific variables.
Hidden Factors Affecting IoT price
If possible, avoiding the items in the below list will keep your prices lower:
- Optimizing the product to be as small as possible
- Optimizing the product to have as long a battery life as possible
- Having many moving parts inside the product
- Doing complex local processing on the IoT device
- Having 3 or more wireless radios on the device
Understanding IoT Cost Structure
The cost structure behind the estimator computes the time, effort, and
skill-level that will need to go into the below categories:
Electrical Engineering
- Product requirement documentation
- Technical architecture
- COGS estimates
- Schematic circuit design
- PCB layout design
- Bill of material generation
- Product certifications
Mechanical Engineering
- Customer research and insights
- Design sketches
- 3D modeling
- 3D printing
- Mechanical and electrical integration
- Contract manufacturing management
Embedded Firmware
- System requirement definition
- System architecture definition
- Driver design and embedded firmware
- Mobile and cloud integration
- Test case and system verification
Understanding the IoT Timeline
The IoT Project Cost Estimator outputs an estimated timeline for your project.
The timeline will include the following three phases:
1
Product Definition
Defining the vision, look, feel, and technical architecture for the product.
2
Engineering Prototype
The first manufacturing prototypes of your product, used for alpha testing.
2
3
Production Prototypes
The final prototypes of your product, used for beta testing. The Production Prototypes are ready to take to a manufacturing for production ramp-up.