How to Cut Your Costs

• Baseline costs
• Retention policy / culling schedule
• Cold storage
• Photo resolution

Baseline costs

Aevocam offers very practical ways to keep your costs to a minimum. Not just in the early days, but also over the long term. To understand how to cut costs you first must have a solid understanding of our baseline costs for service .

In a nutshell, your monthly fees are primarily based on how how many megapixels of image content you store. Which means that your primary way to save money is to reduce how much image content you store. Over time you want to keep the useful photos and discard the others.

Retention policy / culling schedule

Time slots

Your starting point is the settings you choose for your camera feeds at the time of photo ingestion. While you can simply accept every photo sent by your cameras, we strongly recommend you configure fixed-time slots if your main goal is long term monitoring (versus short term time-lapse photography like on a construction site). One of the simplest ways to save money would be to take and retain a single photo at noon every day. But maybe you would feel more comfortable saving 3 or 5 from different hours each day.

Uploading too many photos

The next way to cut costs at ingest time is to make sure your camera is not uploading too many photos each day. Your time slots for a feed gatekeep what is retained. But if your camera is "chatty" then you will see extra ingestion costs. Sending extra photos is actually a good strategy for ensuring that you do get your time slots filled. But you'll want to find the right balance between ensuring that and minimizing ingestion costs.

Culling schedule

You probably will get more value out of your more recent photos than your older ones most of the time. Aevocam lets you automatically thin out how many photos you retain over time so you can get that balance between "high resolution" recent information versus "low resolution" older information.

For example, you might initially upload one photo every half hour 24 hours a day. That would get expensive if you stored that for many years across many cameras. So maybe after the first 3 months you decide to cull it down to 3 representative photos each day. That cuts your long term storage costs by 94%. And maybe after the first year you cull it down to just 1 per day, cutting down from your original costs by 98%. You might at the 10 year mark opt to cull that down to retaining one photo per month, thus cutting your long term storage costs down by over 99.9%.

It may sound absurd to only keep 1 photo per week or month from some camera. But this is how you can retain potentially centuries of photographic history of a shoreline, skyline, or agricultural field with a nearly flat fee over the long term.

You define your culling schedule in whatever manner gives you the best balance of information retention and cost.

Cold storage

Your retention policy gives you the option to move some of your photos to "cold storage". This takes them out of regular rotation. They won't show up in the player or as part of your regular storage stats. But they will still be there for you to restore when you need them.

Cold storage is meant as a hedge for you against data loss while greatly reducing your per-megabyte storage costs. You can pretend photos in cold storage are deleted while having the peace of mind of knowing they are still there.

Photo resolution

Higher resolution means more megapixels per photo and thus higher storage costs. We actually recommend that you keep the highest resolution images your camera can produce and simply lower the rate at which photos are uploaded to keep costs the same. When it comes to long term condition monitoring, every pixel counts.

But if you really want to squeeze costs down to a minimum, you can of course choose lower resolution images.

Note that you pay per megapixel, not per megabyte. Take advantage by not opting for high image compression, which distorts your photos. Send the highest quality your camera offers.