Amazon Web Services (AWS), To Revamp Pricing For Its IoT Platform AWS will soon make changes to the way it bills its users of its Internet of Things platform. This will result in customer savings of up 40 percent, Amazon Web Services (AWS), said this month. According to Jeff Barr, AWS evangelist, the company will change from its per-message billing model to AWS IoT. He wrote about the changes in a blog last week. AWS IoT billing has been based on the number of messages a user published to the service. Barr stated that while the billing model was simple, it meant that some customers were actually paying for parts AWS IoT they didn’t use. “For example, some customers use AWS IoT quite often, while others only use a few rule sets and ping it very rarely.” The new pricing model eliminates the old, all-inclusive billing system and instead sets different prices for each AWS IoT component. Barr described some of these changes in the following:

• Connectivity — Metered in one minute increments and based upon the total time your devices have been connected to AWS IoT. Prices start at $0.08 per million minutes. This is equivalent to $0.042 per device per annum for 24/7 connectivity. No additional cost for keep-alive pings. Devices can send them at intervals of 30 seconds to 20 minutes.
• Messaging — Metered based on the number of messages sent between your devices and AWS IoT. Pricing starts at $1 per message, with volume pricing starting at $0.70 per million. You can send and receive messages of up to 128 kilobytes. Messages are now metered in increments of 5 kilobytes, up from 512 bytes before. An 8 kilobyte message can be metered as two messages.
• Rules Engine — This is the price for when a rule is triggered and for how many actions are executed within a given rule. There must be at least one action per rule. Prices are $0.15 per million rules-triggered, $0.15 per mille action-executed. Rules that process messages exceeding 5 kilobytes in size are metered at the next multiple to the 5 kilobyte. A rule that processes an 8-kilobyte message, for example, is metered as two separate rules.
• Device Shadow & Registry updates — Metered based on the number or modifications to Device Shadow or Registry data. Prices start at $1.25 per one million operations. Device Shadow and Registry operations are metered at 1 kilobyte increments depending on the size of the Registry or Device Shadow records. Two operations are required to update a 1.5 kilobyte Shadow file.

The new pricing model will be in effect from the beginning of 2018. Barr stated that the new pricing model will result in lower invoices for most customers. Barr stated that the AWS Free Tier will be expanded to accommodate up 50 devices on AWS IoT.