A small shop usually asks this the other way round: is a monitoring system worth it when the owner can walk the whole floor in a minute? Walking the floor shows which machines are running right now. It doesn’t show the twenty short stops each one had since morning.
The break-even, in minutes
ThingConnect costs ₹79 per machine per day, billed annually — ₹28,835 per machine per year. Spread over 330 working days, that is about ₹87 per machine per working day. Divide by what an hour of your machine time is worth, and you get the minutes it has to recover:
₹600 / hour
- Minutes to recover per machine per working day
- about 8.7 minutes
₹900 / hour
- Minutes to recover per machine per working day
- about 5.8 minutes
₹1,200 / hour
- Minutes to recover per machine per working day
- about 4.4 minutes
₹1,800 / hour
- Minutes to recover per machine per working day
- about 2.9 minutes
| Your machine-hour rate | Minutes to recover per machine per working day |
|---|---|
| ₹600 / hour | about 8.7 minutes |
| ₹900 / hour | about 5.8 minutes |
| ₹1,200 / hour | about 4.4 minutes |
| ₹1,800 / hour | about 2.9 minutes |
Recovering means time that was lost and no longer is: a stop that gets fixed faster because someone saw it, a recurring wait that gets designed out, a setup that gets shorter once its real length is visible. Put your own rate and downtime into the downtime cost calculator to see which side of the line you are on.
A 5-machine example
Five machines, ₹1,200 per machine-hour, 330 working days (illustrative):
Subscription (5 × ₹28,835)
- Year 1
- ₹1,44,175
- Year 2 onwards
- ₹1,44,175
Deployment (from ₹40,000, once)
- Year 1
- ₹40,000
- Year 2 onwards
- —
Total
- Year 1
- ₹1,84,175
- Year 2 onwards
- ₹1,44,175
Break-even per machine per working day
- Year 1
- about 5.6 minutes
- Year 2 onwards
- about 4.4 minutes
| Year 1 | Year 2 onwards | |
|---|---|---|
| Subscription (5 × ₹28,835) | ₹1,44,175 | ₹1,44,175 |
| Deployment (from ₹40,000, once) | ₹40,000 | — |
| Total | ₹1,84,175 | ₹1,44,175 |
| Break-even per machine per working day | about 5.6 minutes | about 4.4 minutes |
The first year carries the one-time deployment, so the bar is a little higher; after that it is the subscription alone. For the other side of the sum, the ROI calculator takes your machine count, rate and the minutes you expect to recover.
What’s different for a small shop
- The price is per machine. Five machines pay for five machines; there is no plant-size licence. The ₹79 rate applies up to 10 machines.
- Deployment is scaled to the floor. It runs from ₹40,000 to ₹75,000 depending on machine count, quoted after a site survey.
- You can test it first. The ₹50,000 60-day pilot is credited in full if you continue, so the first decision is two months, not a year.
- The owner is usually the user. In a small shop the person reading the numbers is the one who can act on them the same day.
When it isn’t worth it
It is fair to say no when:
- Each machine runs one long job for days and someone already watches every stop — there are few minutes left to find.
- Your machine-hour rate is low enough that the break-even minutes are more than you could plausibly recover.
- Nobody will act on the numbers. Monitoring shows where time goes; it doesn’t recover it on its own.
If none of those apply, the pilot is the cheapest way to find out with your own machines instead of an estimate. See pricing for the full breakdown.