TL;DR
- ▸Four lanes: PAYG from £1.12/device/day (1–20 devices), Professional at £799/month flat (up to 100 devices), Enterprise at £2,495/month flat with compliance included, Enterprise+ custom for 351+.
- ▸Overage above 100 devices on Professional is £25/device/month, billed automatically. At 167 devices the overage total equals the Enterprise rate — billing rounds to £2,495/month and the compliance layer switches on automatically.
- ▸No manual upgrade. No new contract. No unexpected step change in billing. You never pay more than Enterprise.
Why the model changed
The previous Sync Insight pricing was a tiered grid — five retention periods, five volume brackets, 25 per-device-per-day rates. It was honest about how the underlying cost scaled but confusing to procure against: organisations that knew they had between 50 and 200 devices could not tell whether they were Professional or Enterprise until they read the grid, calculated the total at their current volume, and then projected what the total would become after 18 months of typical growth.
The new model is simpler at every tier. PAYG for trials and small deployments — quoted per-device-per-day at the store, self-serve, no procurement approval needed. Professional at £799/month flat for up to 100 devices — no per-device counting, no surprise bills when a site scales from 50 to 80 devices. Enterprise at £2,495/month flat with the full compliance layer included. The scale transitions between tiers are handled by the overage mechanic, which is where the design effort went.
The aim was to make the procurement conversation match the technical conversation. If a team wants to start small, the PAYG lane has no commitment. If a team is committing at scale, Professional and Enterprise are predictable monthly fees. The uncomfortable middle ground — where a team knows they will grow but does not want to buy an Enterprise contract today — is where the overage model comes in.
The overage mechanic — what 101–166 devices actually costs
A team on Professional at £799/month covers up to 100 devices in the base fee. Device 101 adds £25/month to the bill. Device 102 adds another £25. Each additional device up to and including 167 adds £25 — and at 167 devices the overage total (67 × £25 = £1,675) plus the £799 base reaches £2,474, which is within £21 of the Enterprise flat rate of £2,495.
At 167 devices the billing rounds to £2,495 — the same amount the team would pay on a direct Enterprise contract — and the compliance features unlock automatically. UTC Verification activates. MiFID II, DORA, CAT and FINRA compliance reports start generating. The 90-day retention replaces the Professional default of 30 days. None of this requires a new contract, a sales call or a procurement cycle. The billing mechanism is the upgrade mechanism.
Above 167 devices, billing stays at £2,495/month up to the Enterprise ceiling of 350 devices. The team has effectively slid from Professional into Enterprise through monthly-arrears overage with no procurement intervention. This is the design property that matters: procurement does not have to predict the scale transition, and infrastructure teams do not have to throttle device adds to stay below a contract boundary.
| Devices | Monthly calculation | Monthly cost | Annual cost | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 100 | £799 base | £799 | £9,588 | Professional |
| 110 | £799 + 10 × £25 | £1,049 | £12,588 | Professional + overage |
| 130 | £799 + 30 × £25 | £1,549 | £18,588 | Professional + overage |
| 150 | £799 + 50 × £25 | £2,049 | £24,588 | Professional + overage |
| 167 | £799 + 67 × £25 → cap | £2,495 | £29,688 | ★ Auto-caps → Enterprise |
| 200 | Enterprise cap | £2,495 | £29,940 | Enterprise |
| 350 | Enterprise cap | £2,495 | £29,940 | Enterprise |
| 351+ | Custom annual contract | Custom | Custom | Enterprise+ |
The principle in one sentence
You never pay more than Enterprise. Overage is a smooth ramp from Professional to Enterprise, not a cliff — growing from 100 to 110 devices costs an extra £300 per year; growing from 100 to 167 devices costs an extra £24,100 per year, at which point you are automatically on Enterprise with the full compliance layer included.
Which lane fits which deployment
The honest answer for most teams is: start on PAYG, let the data decide. At £1.12 per device per day for up to 9 devices, a 10-device trial runs at £11/day — self-serve at the store, no procurement approval, live in under an hour. Two weeks of telemetry tells you whether the observability is worth formalising. If yes, the next step is Professional; if not, you cancel with no penalty.
If the deployment is already beyond 20 devices, Professional at £799/month is almost always the right next lane. It covers up to 100 devices with no per-device counting — you can scale a site from 25 to 75 devices without touching the bill. The compliance features are not included at this tier, but a deployment that is purely operational monitoring (distributed databases, Kubernetes clusters, SRE observability) does not need them.
Teams that know they need compliance features from day one — MiFID II attestation, DORA evidence exports, UTC Verification, CAT reporting — go direct to Enterprise at £2,495/month. This is the common path for financial entities with more than 100 devices where the compliance layer is the reason for the deployment. It is also the path for teams that want the compliance features at smaller scale; Enterprise is sold at its published rate regardless of device count within the 101–350 range, so a 120-device finance deployment with compliance output pays the same £2,495/month as a 300-device deployment with the same output.
| Lane | Best fit | When to move up |
|---|---|---|
| PAYG | Trials, pilots, SME — ≤20 devices. No procurement approval needed. | At 21+ devices Professional flat is cheaper than PAYG at every retention. |
| Professional | Enterprise IT monitoring, distributed DBs, Kubernetes, early-stage finance — up to 100 devices, no compliance layer. | At 167+ devices overage auto-caps and Enterprise features switch on automatically. |
| Enterprise | Finance venues, CCO-level compliance owners, tier-1 banks — 101–350 devices with UTC Verification and compliance reports. | At 351+ devices the deployment moves to Enterprise+ annual contract. |
| Enterprise+ | Tier-1 banks at full scale, exchanges, large telcos, CNI operators. | The commercial conversation is bespoke — retention, SLAs, implementation. |
Why finance-venue deployments go direct to Enterprise
The overage mechanic works well when the deployment's growth trajectory is gradual and the compliance requirement is uncertain. For finance venues that know from day one they need UTC Verification and full compliance reporting, going direct to Enterprise at £2,495/month activates the compliance layer from day one. Professional + overage reaches the same destination at 167 devices, but Professional up to 100 devices plus overage up to 167 is technically operating without UTC Verification in place.
For a firm with active DORA exposure, that gap matters. DORA Articles 9 and 10 require accurate records and continuous monitoring from the moment the deployment goes live; waiting for overage to reach the auto-cap before attestation activates is not a tenable compliance posture. Enterprise-from-day-one is the procurement pattern that matches the compliance reality.
The upside is that Enterprise pricing is flat across the 101–350 range. A firm deploying 120 devices pays £29,940 per year; the same firm scaling to 300 devices in 18 months pays £29,940 per year. The compliance layer scales without re-pricing — and the implementation / onboarding cost of Enterprise does not re-accrue with each device add.
Retention — the add-on that matters and the one that usually doesn't
PAYG retention is self-serve at the store — 7, 14, 30, 60 or 90 days, priced per-device-per-day at rates that reflect the storage cost. Professional includes 30 days by default; a 90-day add-on is +£150/month and 12-month retention is a custom quote. Enterprise includes 90 days by default; 12-month retention is +£500/month. Enterprise+ retention is bespoke.
The 90-day-to-12-month upgrade matters for two specific use cases. Financial compliance audit windows sometimes extend to 12 months or beyond for certain CAT reporting scenarios and for jurisdictions with extended regulatory oversight. Certain regulated industries (pharma, certain defence contexts) have internal retention policies that exceed the standard compliance window. For everyone else — the majority of enterprise IT, most finance deployments, almost all telecom and broadcast — the default retention at each tier is sufficient.
The retention decision is separable from the lane decision. A team can run on Professional with the 90-day add-on if they want extended retention without the compliance layer. A team on Enterprise can take the default 90 days without the 12-month add-on if they do not have the extended retention requirement. The add-on changes only the retention line of the bill.
The retention rule of thumb
If your compliance framework requires evidence retention beyond 90 days, add 12-month retention. If your post-incident investigation cadence is typically within weeks, 30–90 days is fine. If you are not sure, the default at each tier is the right starting position — retention can be added later without repricing the rest of the deployment.
What the pricing change does not affect
Every technical capability is unchanged. The Timebeat Agent emits the same 167 telemetry fields across all lanes. Sync Insight's Grafana dashboards, Elastic native transport, REST / gRPC API are the same at every tier. The difference between lanes is scale, retention and the compliance report layer — not the telemetry or the observability itself.
Deployment model is unchanged. Every lane can deploy on Timebeat Cloud or self-hosted on the customer's own Elasticsearch cluster. The TimeBeat Agent binary is the same. The compliance attestation mechanism (UTC Verification, when enabled at Enterprise) is the same. Cross-regulator coverage — ESMA, SEC, FINRA, MAS, HKFSC, ASIC — is the same compliance engine with different report templates per jurisdiction.
Support is unchanged in its coverage. 24/7 support is included from Enterprise; Professional and PAYG have business-hours support with published response SLAs. The support model does not introduce different tier-to-tier escalation policies — all customers reach the same support team, with the same escalation path, through the same channels. The tier affects response-time guarantees, not support quality.
How to size a new deployment
Start from device count and compliance profile. If the device count is ≤20, PAYG is the default — trial at zero procurement friction. If 21–100 and no compliance layer required, Professional at £799/month flat. If 101+ and compliance required, Enterprise at £2,495/month direct. If 101–166 and compliance not required yet, Professional + overage is fine — the auto-cap will handle the transition when compliance requirements materialise.
For long-range planning (procurement cycles that cover 3+ years), project device count and compliance trajectory. A team starting at 40 devices expecting 12-month growth to 80 is comfortably Professional for the period. A team starting at 60 expecting growth to 180 will cross the auto-cap within 12 months — the Enterprise line is the right planning figure from the start.
For finance entities under active DORA review, Enterprise-from-day-one is the safest procurement pattern. The compliance layer is in place when the first attestation window begins, and the £29,940 annual line is predictable for the 3-year procurement horizon. The operational savings (manual compliance tooling replaced, engineering FTE freed up) typically net-fund the Enterprise line within the first year.
Contact
PAYG trial: register at timebeat.app/store — instant activation. Professional or Enterprise procurement: sales@timebeat.app · +44 7989 140 622. Enterprise+ custom contracts: contact Kevin Covington directly.