AWS services and costs

AWS cost estimation

The main total AWS cost can be estimated as follows

total cost = connectivity cost + storage cost (optional) + AI cost (optional)

Connectivity cost

The connectivity cost includes costs for all services excluding the storage and AI. This provides a connection to a camera, the ability to access, manage, and watch video and receive camera events.

For 24/7 connectivity it is typically

• $1/month per camera.

This cost can be significantly reduced in the case of event-based connectivity, or by using an enhanced Uplink module on cameras. In this case the typical cost is

• $0.1 - $0.3/month per camera

The AWS storage cost is approximately

• $2/month with H.265, or $3/month with H.264 per camera for 24/7 continuous recording and 30 days retention, or

• $0.5/month per camera for event recording and 30 days retention.

• $0.2 - $0.5/month per camera for AI filtered recordings.

The estimate is based on 1Mbps bitrate for H.264 and 0.65Mbps for H.265 and S3 Infrequent access single zone $10/month per TB.

The AI cost (object recognition) is an extra service that can be enabled and disabled per camera at any time. If enabled, it’s typically from half a dollar to a few dollars/month per camera and depends on the amount of motion.

Typical AWS services

The main 3 operational costs are the following:

1. S3 storage

2. EC2 instances

3. RDS database

S3 storage starts from $10/month per TB for One Zone - Infrequent Access storage type, which we recommend for video. 1TB is sufficient for approximately 3 IP cameras with 24/7 - 30 days full framerate recording or 18 IP cameras motion - 30 days recording (see more on S3 pricing here).

One m5.large EC2 instance can serve approximately 100 IP cameras and it costs $69/month for on-demand or $44/month for reserved instances (see more on EC2 pricing here and here).

The RDS database starts from $9/month for instances like db.t3.micro (see more on RDS pricing here) and can be in hundreds of dollars for multizone instances as the system grows.

Other costs, such as egress (streaming) costs, ELB, and other services are less significant.

Idle Cloud VMS

A minimal set of services should be running regardless of connected cameras. The cost per camera will decrease with more cameras connected to the Cloud VMS. See the estimates of the minimal cost and the cost per camera in AWS first and minimal deployment and AWS production deployment sections.