What is it
Per-device pricing is a billing unit where each hardware device or endpoint connected to the AI platform is metered.
The device becomes the natural billing anchor when the software is delivered through physical hardware. Eko Health sells FDA-cleared AI digital stethoscopes and gates the disease-detection AI behind a per-device subscription — the stethoscope is both product and the unit recurring value attaches to. Skydio, the largest US autonomous-drone maker, sells X10 and X10D drones outright, then subscribes software (Care, Remote Ops, Cloud) per drone over multi-year contracts.
This two-part structure — hardware purchase plus per-device software subscription — is a razor-and-blades model common in medical-device AI and industrial autonomy, where hardware capex is significant and the recurring software value accrues over the asset’s lifetime.
The device count is a legible capacity proxy: a hospital running 20 Eko stethoscopes has 4× the AI screening footprint of one running 5, and a 50-drone fleet is more infrastructure than a 5-drone fleet regardless of operator headcount. Pricing per device captures that scaling in a unit procurement teams already understand — a value-metric choice.
How it works
Per-device billing registers each hardware device activated on the platform and charges a recurring fee per active device — typically a subscription that unlocks or manages the AI running on that unit. Activation, not daily usage frequency, usually triggers the recurring charge.
| Company | Device | Hardware (one-time) | Per-device software | Model |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Eko Health | AI digital stethoscope | $259 CORE Attachment · $379 3M Littmann CORE · $449 CORE 500 | Eko+ at $12.99/mo or $119.99/yr (unlocks AI); Eko Vet+ $180/yr | Public store; SENSORA health-system platform quoted |
| Skydio | Autonomous drone (X10 / X10D) | No first-party rate card — reseller X10 kits ~$15,000–$20,000; Dock for X10 ~$57,744 | Care / Remote Ops / Skydio Cloud, quoted per drone over multi-year contracts (~30% of revenue) | Sales-led / GSA; no published per-drone price |
The unit math for the transparent case is straightforward:
Annual software cost = number_of_devices × annual_per_device_rate
Worked example (Eko Health, individual clinician): a CORE 500 device is $449 one-time, and Eko+ is $119.99/yr, so first-year total is ~$569 and every subsequent year is $119.99 in recurring per-device software. A cardiology department deploying 20 CORE 500 units pays roughly 20 × $449 = $8,980 in Year 1 hardware plus 20 × $119.99 = $2,399.80/yr in ongoing Eko+ software.
Skydio follows the same pattern — hardware once, software per drone, every year — but publishes no first-party rate card: skydio.com/pricing returns a 404, and every bundle is quoted via “Request a demo” or bought through government schedules (GSA/DLA). The per-device rate at fleet scale is negotiated in the contract, not read off a table. For how a recurring software tail on hardware capex gets invoiced, see usage-invoicing and billing cycles.
Companies using this
Two corpus companies meter physical devices: Eko Health, licensing AI cardiac-screening software per stethoscope, and Skydio, subscribing fleet-management and autonomy software per drone. Both pair an outright hardware sale with a recurring per-device fee to build durable revenue on a physical installed base.
| Company | Product | Pricing model | Billing units | Free tier | Verified |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Eko Health | AI cardiac & pulmonary disease detection on a digital stethoscope | Yes | 2026-07-21 | ||
| Skydio | Autonomous drones, docks & flight-autonomy software for defense, public safety & enterprise | No | 2026-06-14 |
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FAQ
What is per-device pricing?
Per-device pricing is a billing unit where each hardware device or endpoint connected to the AI platform is metered. The physical device — a stethoscope, a drone, a sensor — is both the product sold and the natural billing anchor, because each device represents a discrete unit of deployed AI capability that scales with the customer's physical footprint.
Which companies use per-device pricing?
In the UsagePricing blueprint corpus, Eko Health and Skydio both meter physical devices. Eko Health sells FDA-cleared AI digital stethoscopes ($259 CORE Attachment, $379 3M Littmann CORE, $449 CORE 500) and layers the Eko+ software subscription ($12.99/mo or $119.99/yr) on top of each device. Skydio sells X10/X10D drones outright and subscribes per-drone software (Skydio Care, Remote Ops, Skydio Cloud) over multi-year contracts.
How does per-device pricing differ from per-seat pricing?
Per-seat pricing counts human users; per-device pricing counts physical endpoints. For hardware AI products, devices often outnumber the people managing them — a fleet operator might run 50 drones with 5 staff — so metering the device tracks deployed capacity more faithfully than headcount. It also lets a hardware sale convert into a recurring software relationship priced against the installed base rather than the team size.
Is per-device pricing usage-based or subscription pricing?
It is usually a hybrid. The device count acts as a capacity proxy rather than a raw usage meter, and the recurring charge is typically a fixed per-device subscription. Both Eko Health and Skydio combine an outright hardware sale with a recurring per-device software fee — a razor-and-blades structure where the device lands the customer and the subscription earns the margin.
Related billing units
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- Token-Based PricingA billing unit common in LLM and AI products, where customers are charged per input and output token processed.
- Per-Seat PricingA billing unit where the vendor charges a fixed fee per named user, regardless of how much each user consumes.
- Per-Resolution PricingA billing unit unique to AI customer-support products, where the vendor charges only when an AI agent resolves a customer issue without escalation.
- Bandwidth-Based PricingA billing unit where customers are charged per gigabyte of data transferred out of the platform.
- Per-Function-Invocation PricingA billing unit where customers are charged per serverless function invocation, often combined with a separate compute-time charge.
- CPU-Hour PricingA billing unit where customers are charged for the CPU time their workloads consume, typically measured in vCPU-seconds or vCPU-hours.
- GB-Hour PricingA billing unit where customers are charged for the memory their workloads consume over time, measured in gigabyte-hours.
- GPU-Hour PricingA billing unit where customers are charged for GPU time consumed, typically measured per-second or per-hour by GPU type.
- Per-API-Call PricingA billing unit where customers are charged per API request, regardless of payload size or processing time.
- Per-GB Storage PricingA billing unit where customers are charged per gigabyte of data stored on the platform per month.
- Media-Minute PricingA billing unit where customers are charged per minute of audio or video processed — used by speech, voice, and video AI vendors.
- Per-Request PricingA billing unit where customers are charged per request served — the generic meter for inference endpoints, search, scraping, and browser infrastructure.
- Per-Event PricingA billing unit where customers are charged per event ingested — the native meter of observability and billing-infrastructure platforms.
- Vector Storage PricingA billing unit where customers are charged for vectors stored or indexed — the storage dimension of vector database pricing.
- Per-Character PricingA billing unit where customers are charged per character of text processed — the standard meter for text-to-speech and translation.
- Per-Document PricingA billing unit where customers are charged per document processed or generated — common in AI writing, SEO, and document-intelligence tools.
- Per-Page PricingA billing unit where customers are charged per page crawled, parsed, or rendered — the meter for web scraping and document parsing.
- Per-Transaction PricingA billing unit where customers are charged per financial or billing transaction processed — the meter of billing and accounting platforms.
- Active-User PricingA billing unit where customers are charged per monthly or daily active user rather than per provisioned seat.
- Per-Task PricingA billing unit where customers are charged per task an automation or agent executes — Zapier's historical unit, now spreading to AI agents.
- Per-Unit PricingA billing unit used by robotics, hardware AI, and some SaaS companies where the metered object is a physical or abstract 'unit' — a robot deployed, a device sold, or a defined deliverable.
- Workflow Execution PricingA billing unit where each end-to-end workflow or automation run is metered and billed, regardless of the compute steps it contains.
- Per-Message PricingA billing unit where each individual message or reply in a conversation is metered, common in AI chat and voice platforms.
- Per-Invoice PricingA billing unit used by billing infrastructure platforms where each invoice generated or processed is metered as the primary cost driver.
- Per-Action PricingA billing unit where each discrete action taken by an AI agent or automation is metered — common in browser automation and agentic workflow tools.
- Per-Image PricingA billing unit where each AI-generated image is metered, common in image generation APIs and multimodal AI platforms.
- Per-Conversation PricingA billing unit where each complete customer conversation — from first message to resolution — is metered as a single chargeable event.
- Per-Record PricingA billing unit where each data record processed, labeled, or extracted is metered — common in data platforms and web scraping services.
- Per-Word PricingA billing unit common in translation and localization platforms where the metered object is the word count of content processed.
- Per-Video PricingA billing unit where each AI-generated video is metered, common in video generation and synthetic media platforms.
- Milestone-Based PricingA billing unit used in drug discovery and biotech AI where payment is tied to achieving defined research milestones rather than time or compute consumed.
- Per-Outcome PricingA billing unit where payment is triggered by verified outcomes delivered — distinct from outcome-based pricing models, this refers specifically to 'outcomes' as a countable billing unit.
- Per-Datapoint PricingA billing unit where each individual data measurement or signal ingested is metered — common in cloud cost intelligence and ML evaluation platforms.
- Per-Interaction PricingA billing unit where each patient-agent or user-agent interaction is metered, common in healthcare AI and customer engagement platforms.
- Data Licensing PricingA pricing structure where access to proprietary datasets or data assets is licensed separately from the software or services, common in AI training data and clinical data platforms.
- Robot-Hour PricingA billing unit where each hour a robot or autonomous system operates is metered — the robotics equivalent of a GPU-hour.
- Per-Contact PricingA billing unit where each contact or lead in the database is metered, common in AI sales development and outbound automation platforms.
- Per-Mailbox PricingA billing unit where each connected email mailbox or sending account is metered, common in AI outbound sales and email automation platforms.
- Browser-Hour PricingA billing unit where each hour of headless browser compute time is metered, common in web scraping and browser automation platforms.
- Per-Generation PricingA billing unit where each AI-generated creative asset — image, video, or design — is counted as a 'generation' and metered accordingly.
- Per-Ticket PricingA billing unit where each customer support ticket handled by an AI agent is metered — common in AI customer service platforms.
- Per-Log PricingA billing unit where each LLM request log ingested or stored is metered — common in AI observability and evaluation platforms.
- Per-Trace PricingA billing unit where each distributed trace — a complete record of an LLM request chain — is metered, common in AI observability platforms.
- Per-IP PricingA billing unit where each IP address or proxy endpoint allocated is metered — used by web scraping proxy providers.
- Per-Case PricingA billing unit used in legal AI platforms where each case or matter processed by the AI is metered.
- Per-Report PricingA billing unit where each AI-generated report or analysis document is metered as a discrete output.