# Cost
<a name="cost-overview"></a>

As of March 2026, the cost for running this Guidance with the default settings in the US East (N. Virginia) Region is approximately **$400.00 per month** for processing 1,000 vehicles with moderate usage.

**Note**  
The primary cost drivers are:  
Amazon MSK cluster (\~49% of total cost)
Amazon Managed Service for Apache Flink (\~27% of total cost)
VPC and NAT Gateway (\~15% of total cost)

The following table provides a sample cost breakdown for deploying this Guidance with the default parameters in the US East (N. Virginia) Region for one month.


| AWS Service | Dimensions | Cost [USD] | 
| --- | --- | --- | 
| Amazon MSK | 3 kafka.m5.large brokers, 100 GB storage each | $194.00 | 
| Amazon Managed Service for Apache Flink | 10 KPUs (1 per Flink application) | $108.00 | 
| Amazon VPC | NAT Gateway (2 AZs), data transfer | $45.00 | 
| AWS Lambda | 10M invocations, 512 MB memory | $20.00 | 
| Amazon ElastiCache for Redis | cache.t3.micro node | $12.00 | 
| Amazon CloudFront | 100 GB data transfer | $8.50 | 
| Amazon Location Service | 100K map tile requests, 10K geocoding requests | $8.00 | 
| AWS IoT Core | 108M messages (1,000 vehicles × 3,600 msgs/day) | $3.24 | 
| Amazon DynamoDB | On-demand, 10 GB storage | $3.50 | 
| Amazon API Gateway | 1M REST API calls per month | $3.50 | 
| Amazon S3 | 50 GB storage, 1M requests | $1.50 | 
| Amazon Cognito | 1,000 active users (free tier) | $0.00 | 
|  **Total**  |  |  **\~$400.00**  | 

**Note**  
Prices are subject to change. For full details, refer to the pricing webpage for each AWS service used in this Guidance.

 **Cost Optimization Strategies** 
+ Use DynamoDB on-demand billing to avoid over-provisioning
+ Implement S3 lifecycle policies to archive old telemetry data to S3 Glacier
+ Right-size MSK broker instances based on actual throughput requirements
+ Use appropriate ElastiCache node types for development vs. production environments
+ Enable CloudWatch Logs retention policies to manage log storage costs
+ Monitor and optimize Flink application parallelism based on workload

 **Cost Scaling** 

Costs scale primarily with:
+ Number of vehicles and message volume (IoT Core, MSK, Flink)
+ Data storage requirements (DynamoDB, S3)
+ API request volume (API Gateway, Lambda)
+ Map tile requests and geocoding operations (Location Service)
+ Data transfer and CloudFront usage

For 100 vehicles: \~$250/month For 1,000 vehicles: \~$410/month For 10,000 vehicles: \~$1,200/month

We recommend creating a [Budget](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/cost-management/latest/userguide/budgets-managing-costs.html) through [AWS Cost Explorer](https://aws.amazon.com/aws-cost-management/aws-cost-explorer/) to help manage costs.