Two meters
Two counts, and why they are not one
IoT is the only family with two separate counts. Getting them the wrong way round changes the size of the answer by orders of magnitude, so this page keeps them apart by name, deliberately and at length.
Side by side
AEC — Active Entity Capacity, and IoT Fleet Capacity
Pooled, across families
AEC — Active Entity Capacity
One AEC is one actively managed production entity with live bindings and current state.
AEC is one pool shared across your Agent, MCP, Plugin, API, SDK and logical Service & Workload identities, and your IoT product, model and fleet identities.
For this family, one AEC is an iot product, model or fleet identity you actively manage in production.
Separate, IoT only
IoT Fleet Capacity
A separate count of individual device instances under active management. It is the only meter this family has for devices, and it never consumes AEC.
It is a level, not a flow. Nothing about it resets at the end of a month, so a “per month” framing would describe a billing cadence and never a consumption period.
The rule that generates the confusion
The meter counts devices under active management
A Passport can exist and occupy nothing. Holding an identity consumes no capacity of any kind. The count moves when a device is under active management, and it moves back when it is not.
So a fleet larger than your envelope is a supported condition rather than an error. Devices beyond it become unmanaged, not deleted — and you decide which ones those are.
Holding a Passport
Consumes nothing. The number of IoT identities your organisation holds is not bounded by either meter.
Retired and historical devices
Consume nothing. A device that is shelved, returned or decommissioned stops occupying anything. History is free.
Public reads
Consume nothing, at any scale. Every read of a record — by a person, an auditor, an insurer or a machine — is free and unmetered.
Message and telemetry volume
Consumes nothing. This is not billed by traffic. Payload sizes, message counts and reporting intervals sit outside both meters entirely.
Reaching a limit
What running out never does
- AEC never makes an identity more verified.
- AEC never replaces a Passport.
- AEC never changes an ECZ-ID. Your ECZ-ID does not change.
- Running out of AEC never deletes, revokes or unpublishes an identity.
- Reducing or cancelling capacity never deletes a device, a record or a Passport. Bindings above the envelope become unmanaged, and nothing is destroyed.
- Your ECZ-ID, its Resolver page and its machine JSON keep working, whatever your capacity.
- Your organisation's tier and every Passport's assurance state are unaffected in both directions.
Where the numbers live
No allowance and no price is published here
This page describes the mechanism and names the units. The amounts — what is included, what a larger envelope costs and whether anything can be bought today — are held by TrustOps, which owns them. Typing them here would create a second copy, and a copy is what goes stale.
The free IoT Passport is £0 and is never sold. That is a property of the identity rather than of any envelope.