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Plans & Billing: What are "dots"?

Learn how data ingestion and extraction is metered in Ubidots

David Sepúlveda avatar
Written by David Sepúlveda
Updated over 10 months ago

Inspired in our company name (where "Ubi" stands for Ubiquitous, and "dots" for, well, "dots"), a "dot" is a data point containing a value and a timestamp:

Every time a device variable is updated, then one data point or "dot" is created. For example, if you have a weather station with 4 sensor variables sending data every 10 minutes (i.e. temperature, humidity, pressure, and precipitation), then your device will generate a total of 17,280 dots every month: 

4 dots x 60/10 updates per hour x 24 hours x 30 days = 17,280 dots per month

Dots are billed at million-dots increments, both at the moment of ingestion, and extraction. Every Ubidots plan includes enough Dots In and Dots Out to power most IoT Applications while avoiding overages. However, data-intensive applications might eventually experience overage costs.

Data Ingestion

Ubidots bills for incoming dots and their storage only at the moment they are received. After a dot is received and saved, it will remain in your account for a standard 2-year retention period, without generating further storage charges.

Dots In

$5 per million ingested dots

Data Extraction

Ubidots bills for extracted dots as it is a metric that, even though small, contributes to our own cost base (outbound data transfer + database query operations + processing server load).

Dots Out (via API)

$0.1 per million extracted dots

Dots Out (via synthetic variables)

$0.05 per million extracted dots

Dots Out (via frontend)

Not currently charged for.

NOTE: If your application extracts an extraordinary amount of data (over > 500 Million dots per month), you will need to upgrade to an Enterprise plan.

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