Question 1

How much does an IoT application cost?

Accepted Answer

From $5,000 to $30,000 USD, or A$7,500 to A$42,000. That covers software, not hardware. A pilot with twenty sensors and a dashboard sits near the bottom. Anything above a few thousand devices, needing over-the-air updates, offline buffering and per-device provisioning, moves toward the top. If your budget is under $5,000, we would rather tell you that now than after a discovery call.

Question 2

Do you supply the hardware?

Accepted Answer

No. We write software and firmware. You buy sensors, gateways and modems, or we will name suitable modules and put you in touch with suppliers. Keeping hardware procurement separate is deliberate: it means you own the devices outright, hold the warranties, and can change supplier without changing your software vendor.

Question 3

What happens when a device loses connectivity in the field?

Accepted Answer

The firmware buffers readings in local storage and forwards them once the link returns, with timestamps preserved so you get the true sequence. The buffer has a fixed size. If a device is offline longer than that window, the oldest readings are dropped, and you need to decide whether that is acceptable or whether the device needs more storage. This is a hardware constraint we cannot code around.

Question 4

How do you secure devices that sit in public places?

Accepted Answer

Each device gets a unique certificate rather than a shared password, so one compromised unit cannot impersonate the fleet. Traffic is encrypted in transit, firmware updates are signed, and the dashboard enforces role-based access. Physical access is the honest limitation. If someone can hold the device and read its flash memory, they can extract whatever is stored there, which is why sensitive data should live on the server rather than the device.

Question 5

How long does an IoT project take?

Accepted Answer

Three to six months from scoping to production, and the software is rarely the slow part. Hardware lead times, certification for radio equipment, and the weeks spent testing in the actual environment usually set the pace. A pilot on a bench proves the code works. A pilot in a warehouse in summer proves whether it works in reality, and those are different tests.

Question 6

Who owns the firmware and the platform?

Accepted Answer

You do, including the firmware source, the cloud application and the database schema. We document the message formats so any future developer can pick it up. One thing to plan for: if your devices use a cellular network, the SIM provider controls connectivity, so keep those accounts in your own name rather than ours.

Question 7

What ongoing costs should we budget for?

Accepted Answer

Cloud hosting for the ingestion pipeline and database, typically $50 to $400 USD a month at pilot scale and more as device count grows. Data egress, cellular data plans and any SMS alerting are separate. The database is usually the largest line item, because storing every reading from every device forever gets expensive quickly. We build in downsampling so historical data costs less than live data.

IoT application development