What is a connected fleet worth per month?
Fitting the meter is a one-off sale. Reading it every day for the next ten years is not. This works out what that second part is worth, and how many meters it takes before the platform behind it pays for itself.
You set the price. The €2 starting point is only an example to get you moving the figure — not a recommended price, and not a market rate.
- Revenue per month
- €500
- Revenue per year
- €6,000
- Revenue per meter per year
- €24.00
Break-even point
30 meters
At €2.00 per meter, 30 already covers the Starter plan (€49/mo with 10 meters included and €0.50 per extra meter per month). Past that, every meter you connect is margin for you.
With 250 meters at €2.00 a month you bill €500 a month, €6,000 a year.
This is what you bill, before costs. What the platform costs you — a fixed monthly fee with meters included, plus a price per additional meter — is published, plan by plan, on pricing. It also excludes meters, gateways, connectivity and your own labour.
Why the second number matters more
Installation revenue is lumpy — it arrives with the project and stops when the project does. Monitoring revenue arrives whether or not you won a tender this quarter, and it compounds: every site you connect adds to the base rather than replacing it. It is also what makes a metering business worth something to a buyer, because a book of recurring contracts is valued very differently from a pipeline of one-off installs.
Ready to put a portal behind those meters?
The revenue above assumes your customers can actually see their water. That is the part Datakubo provides — a branded portal per customer, on your domain, with the meters you already installed.
Common questions
- What do installers usually charge per meter per month?
- It varies too widely to quote a market rate, and anyone who gives you one is guessing. It depends on whether the fee covers the portal alone or also alarm handling, reporting and a support line; on whether the customer is a small community or a municipality; and on what the meters replaced. The default in the calculator is a round number to start from, not a benchmark — overwrite it with what you would actually invoice.
- Should the monitoring fee be per meter or per site?
- Per meter scales cleanly and is easy to explain, but it makes small sites look expensive and can price you out of a ten-flat building. Per site is simpler to sell and protects small jobs, but leaves money on the table at a large one. Many installers do both: a floor per site plus a per-meter rate above a threshold.
- How is break-even worked out?
- It is the point where what you bill covers what the platform costs you. Below the plan's included device allowance the fee is flat, so break-even is simply the plan price divided by your price per meter. Above the allowance each extra meter carries its own cost, so break-even solves for the margin between your price and that per-meter cost — which is why a price at or below the per-device cost never breaks even, however many meters you add.
- Does this include the installation revenue?
- No, deliberately. Hardware and labour are a separate, one-off line, and mixing them in makes the recurring figure look better than it is. What is modelled here is only the part that keeps arriving after the van has left.