Why per-unit cost is the wrong metric for industrial controller decisions

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A veteran engineer with 13 years of industrial project experience argues that build-vs-buy decisions for industrial controllers routinely fail because teams focus on per-unit hardware cost rather than total project cost. In a real-world case, a UK energy aggregator was spending £1,200 per installation across 3,000 field sites, prompting evaluation of custom hardware that could drop unit cost to £140. Instead, the team selected a Siemens SIMATIC IOT2020 at £260 per unit, reducing total hardware spend from £3.6M to £780K while avoiding 12–18 months of development, certification risk, and software migration costs. The entire transition engineering cost approximately €20,000, and the existing software stack was preserved with minimal changes. The author recommends evaluating four factors — total volume cost, timeline impact, risk exposure, and software continuity — before committing to either path.

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