AWS cost estimation
Main cost
The main total AWS cost can be estimated as follows
total cost = connectivity cost + storage cost (optional) + AI cost (optional)
The connectivity cost is everything excluding the storage and AI costs and it is typically
$1/month per camera.
This is based on a 24/7 connection to a camera, the ability to access, manage, and watch video and receive camera events.
The AWS storage cost is approximately
$3/month per camera for 30 days of continuous recording, or
$0.5/month per camera for 30 days of event recording.
The estimate is based on 1Mbps bitrate 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 it’s always enabled then it’s typically from one 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:
S3 storage
EC2 instances
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.