FarmBeats pricing and Not getting IOT data from Farmbeats Student kit

Question

Can anyone provide pricing for implementing FarmBeats as POC? I tried using Free trial and free credits, all credit exhausted within 2 to 3 days, consuming mostly FarmBeats App services, Event Hubs etc, I believed FarmBeats is low cost solution, but looks like it's taking huge resources / credits / cost. Appreciate if any one has pricing plan , comparison with other cloud vendors etc. would be helpful.

I tried the farmbeats student kit, but not getting data in Azure IoT Central dashboard, please advise.

Thanks

Answer 1

Hello @Rajshekhar K , Thanks for reaching out to us!.

Regarding FarmBeats pricing:

Microsoft FarmBeats Student Kit:

When you visit the github page ,the section on Register your devices talks about service is provided for free up to a 5 device limit per user.

The FarmBeats Student Kit cloud service is provided for free up to a 5 device limit per user. Any additional devices over the 5 device limit will incur cost. Devices added over the free limit will be programmatically removed unless billing information is provided. Please contact us to arrange.

You may contact the FarmBeats Student Kit support at support@farmbeatslabs.com for any queries related to pricing over here.

Azure FarmBeats (Preview)

Azure FarmBeats is offered at no additional charge and you pay only for the Azure resources you use. Pricing information for these services can be found at Azure Pricing calculator. Usage amounts and billing details for your subscription can be found in the Azure Portal. Azure FarmBeats is currently in public preview. For more information, see Supplemental Terms of Use for Microsoft Azure Previews. Azure FarmBeats is provided without a service level agreement.

Regarding Azure IoT Central dashboard not showing Sensor Data:
I hope you have already followed the instructions on this page Configure your Azure IoT Central Cloud Service and have recieved the IoTCentral link related with your University. You may contact the FarmBeats Student Kit support at support@farmbeatslabs.com for any queries related to the IoTCentral provision and related data ingestion issues.

• You may try Create an Azure IoT Central application instructions and Tutorial: Create and connect a client application to your Azure IoT Central application (Node.js) [Not using the FarmBeats Student Kit account, this is a normal process document for using Azure IoTCentral with either free or paid subscription ]

Update: 09/28/2020

Regarding Price:
Please follow this document for information on Costs incurred

The cost of Azure FarmBeats is an aggregate of the cost of the underlying Azure services. Pricing information for Azure services can be calculated using the Pricing Calculator. The actual cost of the total installation will vary based on the usage. The steady state cost for the two components is: as of 09/28/2020

• Datahub - less than $10 per day
• Accelerator - less than $2 per day

Below is the suggestion from the Product Team which will help you with the query.

We currently don’t have any free credits or a demo site that users can use to try FarmBeats.
Below tips can be useful for the team trying out POC on free Azure credits:

• Delete the resource group after deploying if not required.
• Deploy only when your datasets/scripts for POC are ready.
• You may deploy FarmBeats again to try out more POC scenarios.
• If POC can be continued on a new deployment without much dependency then you may use a new live id to create account and continue to explore FarmBeats.

Please let me know if you need further help in this matter.

Update: 11/5/2020
Response from JayTempletonAWARE-1016
In my experience, Azure FarmBeats seems to run around $250 to $300 USD per month.
The FarmBeats Student Kit is not related to Azure FarmBeats and was for students to learn the basics of IoT in an agriculture context.
However, we are going to be closing this site down and removing the instructions shortly. If you already have the hardware from the kit or are interested in learning about IoT, I would recommend this content from one of the Microsoft Education Advocations for IoT, Jim Bennett. His instructions use the same hardware, also uses Azure IoT Central, and he goes further with additional content. See https://github.com/jimbobbennett/AgroHack