Self-hosting
"I could run mosquitto, postgres and grafana myself for nothing."
You could, and the software really is free. Here is the rest of the bill, which arrives as your time rather than an invoice.
What a thousand devices cost a month, before your time
Software licence, the server it runs on, and what that comes to before anyone is paid to look after it.
Figures are USD/month at 1,000 devices.
| Option | Software USD/month at 1,000 devices | Server USD/month at 1,000 devices | Before your time USD/month at 1,000 devices |
|---|---|---|---|
ThingsBoard Community Edition · self-hosted Free software, and it ships MQTT and dashboards we do not. Everything below this line is yours: upgrades, backups, TLS renewal, and the pager. thingsboard.iochecked 23 Aug 2026 | Software $0 Apache 2.0, genuinely free | Server $20 cheapest tier; $20 to $40 typical | Before your time $20 |
ThingsBoard Professional Edition · self-managed licence You pay for the licence and still run the machine, so the ops burden is identical to Community Edition. thingsboard.iochecked 23 Aug 2026 | Software $499 1,000-device licence | Server $20 cheapest tier; $20 to $40 typical | Before your time $519 |
PidgeIoT · Scale 33% under self-managed Professional Edition before a single hour is counted, and the hours below are ours rather than yours. our own published pricechecked 23 Aug 2026 | Software $349 | Server $0 there is no server | Before your time $349 |
Then your hours, which nobody budgets
Patching, upgrades, backups you have tested restoring, TLS renewal, and being the person who gets paged when ingestion stops. At $75 to $125 an hour, the loaded rate we use for our own build-versus-buy decisions, Community Edition costs what we charge at somewhere between two and a half and four and a half hours a month.
We are not going to tell you how many hours it takes, because it depends on your stack and your luck. You already know roughly what yours are, and that is the number that decides this.
If MQTT, your own dashboards, or owning the box matter more than those hours, self-host. We would rather you did that than pay us and resent it. Simplicity alone wins us nothing against software that is free and good.
The question worth asking instead
Self-hosting is usually bought as insurance against being trapped. Ask about leaving instead: the wire protocol and API are documented and open, telemetry forwards to any InfluxDB-compatible store you own, and every device's history is exportable through the documented API. You can leave, which is worth more than being able to self-host.
Try it before you build it.
Ten devices are free, permanently. If it saves you the weekend, keep it; if it does not, you have lost an afternoon and learned what your own stack would have cost.