LoRaWAN Network Server Costs: Self-Hosted vs. Managed

“ChirpStack is free. TTN is free. Why would anyone pay for a LoRaWAN network server?”

This question surfaces in nearly every IoT architecture review I’ve witnessed. And every time, it leads to the same uncomfortable discovery six months later: the team that chose “free” is now spending 20 hours a week keeping their network server running instead of building the product they actually sell.

The licensing line item on your spreadsheet is a rounding error. The real cost is hiding in your engineering team’s calendar, and in the features you’re not shipping because someone’s debugging Redis cluster issues instead.

This article breaks down what LoRaWAN network server infrastructure actually costs at scale, why the common TTN vs. ChirpStack comparison misses the point, and how to make a defensible decision based on your specific constraints.

The LoRaWAN Network Server Landscape

Before diving into costs, let’s map the options:

Self-hosted open source: ChirpStack dominates here. It’s MIT-licensed, well-documented, and genuinely capable. You run it on your infrastructure, you own it entirely.

Managed platforms: The Things Network (TTN) offers both free community and paid tiers. Actility ThingPark, Loriot, Senet, and AWS IoT Core for LoRaWAN provide enterprise managed services with varying pricing models.

Hybrid approaches: Some organizations self-host ChirpStack but use managed databases, or run managed platforms with custom integration layers.

This isn’t a feature comparison; plenty of those exist. We’re focused purely on cost structures and the factors that make each option expensive or economical for different organizations.

Self-Hosted Cost Breakdown: Where the Money Actually Goes

Let’s build a realistic cost model for running ChirpStack at three scale tiers: 1,000 devices, 10,000 devices, and 50,000 devices.

Infrastructure Costs

Your ChirpStack deployment needs compute, database, and monitoring infrastructure. Here’s what typical cloud deployments look like:

These numbers assume AWS or GCP with reasonable redundancy. You can cut them significantly with single-node deployments, until your single node fails at 2 AM and your 10,000 devices go dark.

Labor Costs: The Hidden Majority

Here’s where spreadsheet comparisons fall apart. Engineers cost money, and self-hosted infrastructure demands ongoing attention.

Initial setup and hardening: Plan for 40-80 hours to get a production-ready deployment. At $200/hour fully-loaded engineering cost, that’s $8,000-$16,000 before you’ve processed a single uplink.

Ongoing maintenance varies dramatically by scale:

At enterprise scale, you’re looking at essentially a half-time DevOps position dedicated to your LoRaWAN network server. That’s not including the on-call burden, which has its own cost in team morale and retention.

The Opportunity Cost Nobody Calculates

Those 22 hours a month at 10,000 devices? That’s 264 hours a year, over six weeks of full-time engineering work.

What could your team build with six weeks? A new integration? A customer-facing feature? Better analytics?

If your core product isn’t “LoRaWAN network infrastructure,” every hour spent maintaining ChirpStack is an hour not spent on what actually differentiates your business. This opportunity cost doesn’t show up on any invoice, which is precisely why it gets ignored until engineering velocity mysteriously drops.

Managed Platform Cost Breakdown

Managed LoRaWAN platforms typically price using one of these models:

• Per-device/month: $0.50-$3.00 per device depending on volume and tier
• Per-message: $0.0001-$0.001 per uplink/downlink
• Tiered subscriptions: Fixed monthly fee with device caps
• Enterprise custom: Negotiated based on volume commitments

What You’re Paying For

The subscription fee covers:

• Uptime SLAs: Typically 99.9% or better with financial penalties for breaches
• Automatic updates: Security patches and feature releases without your involvement
• Support tiers: From documentation-only to 24/7 phone support
• Compliance certifications: SOC 2, ISO 27001, and similar certifications that are painful to obtain yourself

What’s Not Included

Don’t assume the managed platform covers:

• Integration development: Getting data from the network server to your application is still your problem
• Application infrastructure: Databases, APIs, dashboards are all separate
• Overage charges: Exceeding message or device limits can spike costs unexpectedly. Read the fine print.

Ballpark Managed Costs by Scale

These ranges are deliberately wide because pricing varies significantly based on message volume, support requirements, and negotiation leverage.

TTN vs. ChirpStack: Why This Comparison Misses the Point

“TTN vs. ChirpStack” is the most common LoRaWAN network server comparison search, but it’s comparing apples to infrastructure responsibility.

TTN Community Edition

True cost: $0 licensing. But:

• Fair use policy limits you to 30 seconds of airtime per device per day
• No SLA means shared infrastructure and shared outages
• Limited downlink capacity that becomes painful for confirmed messages

Appropriate for: Prototyping, hobby projects, small deployments where occasional downtime is acceptable.

Hidden cost: Migration pain. When you outgrow Community Edition, you’re rebuilding integrations, reconfiguring devices, and explaining to stakeholders why the “free” solution suddenly needs budget.

TTN Paid Tiers

The Things Industries offers managed tiers with dedicated capacity, SLAs, and support. Pricing puts it in line with other managed platforms: reasonable, but no longer “free.”

ChirpStack Self-Hosted

Licensing cost: $0 (MIT license).

True cost: Everything we calculated in the self-hosted section. At 10,000 devices, you’re looking at roughly $5,500/month when you include realistic labor. That’s potentially more expensive than managed alternatives while consuming engineering bandwidth.

The flexibility is real. You can customize protocol handling, implement exotic integrations, and maintain complete data control. Whether that flexibility is worth the operational burden depends entirely on whether you need it.

The core issue: TTN Community and ChirpStack self-hosted both appear free, but one is free-with-limits and the other is free-with-labor-costs. Neither is actually free at production scale.

A Framework for Your Decision

Skip the feature matrices. Answer these questions honestly:

Lean Toward Self-Hosted If:

• You have dedicated DevOps/infrastructure engineers who aren’t already overloaded
• You need deep protocol-level customization, not just configuration, but actual behavioral changes
• Data residency requirements preclude third-party hosting entirely
• Building network server expertise is a strategic competency for your organization (you’re an IoT platform company, not an IoT-using company)
• Your device fleet is large enough that per-device pricing becomes punitive, typically 100K+ devices

Lean Toward Managed If:

• Engineering bandwidth is your primary constraint
• You need contractual uptime guarantees to satisfy your own SLAs
• Predictable monthly costs matter more than theoretical optimization
• Time-to-deployment is critical, since managed platforms get you running in days, not weeks
• Your core business isn’t network infrastructure; it’s what you do with the data

The Honest Assessment

Most organizations underestimate their labor costs and overestimate their customization needs. The teams that successfully self-host at scale typically have IoT infrastructure as a core competency, not a supporting function.

If your engineering team groans when the network server needs attention, you have your answer.

Making the Right Choice for Your Scale

The “cheapest” LoRaWAN network server depends on what you’re optimizing for. Raw cost at small scale? TTN Community wins until you hit limits. Cost predictability at mid-scale? Managed platforms provide it. Maximum control at enterprise scale with dedicated DevOps? Self-hosted ChirpStack becomes viable.

What you can’t do is treat licensing cost as total cost. The organizations that thrive with self-hosted deployments budget for it honestly: infrastructure, labor, and opportunity cost included. The ones that struggle chose “free” without calculating what they’d actually spend.

Before your next architecture review, run the real numbers for your scale. Include every hour of engineering time at fully-loaded cost. Then decide whether you’re in the infrastructure business or just need infrastructure that works.

Hubble Network connects devices directly to satellites using standard Bluetooth chips—no ground infrastructure to manage at all. See how it works →