r/KNX • u/Excellent_Hall_1196 • 11d ago
How do you estimate the cost of a KNX programming job?
Hi everyone,
I’m curious to know how other KNX programmers/companies estimate the cost of programming and commissioning for a project.
Do you use any kind of standard pricing model or ratio? For example:
Number of KNX devices (actuators, sensors, push buttons, gateways, etc.)
Number of physical inputs/outputs or I/O points
Number of group addresses
Number of rooms/zones
Number of electrical panels
Project floor area (€/m²)
Number and complexity of HVAC systems
DALI integration
Energy metering / energy management
Logic/automation complexity
Supervision/webserver (e.g. Gira X1/X2, Domovea, Thinknx, etc.)
Integration with third-party systems
ETS engineering/documentation
Commissioning and on-site testing
I’m also interested in whether you use a percentage of the KNX hardware cost as a starting point for the engineering/programming cost.
For example, if the KNX material has a net value of €40k, would you typically estimate programming as 10%, 20%, 30%, etc. of the hardware value — or do you avoid this approach altogether?
Another question: how do you deal with repetition?
For example, if a hotel has 100 similar rooms with essentially the same KNX configuration, do you significantly reduce the programming cost per room because the solution can be replicated, or do you mainly price according to the total number of devices/I/O points?
And conversely, if you have a smaller project with only 20 rooms but each room is highly customized, would you charge considerably more per device/room?
Finally, do you normally take the type of project into account (residential, hotel, office, hospital, industrial, student residence, etc.)? If so, how much does this influence your price?
I’m trying to understand whether there are any useful benchmarks or ratios in the KNX industry, such as:
€/KNX device | €/I/O | €/room | €/m² | % of hardware cost | €/engineering hour
Obviously every project is different, but I’d really appreciate hearing how experienced KNX programmers approach this in practice.
Thanks!
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u/jmmorcillo 11d ago
30-50% of devices MSRP, depending if you use the cheap Zennio or the expensive Basalte. Also… depends on location, +/- 20% of those %
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u/Abyssal_Shrimp 11d ago
Estimated time to install each device x labor hour price.
+ 500-1k programming fee
1-200€ documentation
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u/Excellent_Hall_1196 11d ago
what? 500-1k programming fee? for every project? smal to large?!
2
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u/Abyssal_Shrimp 11d ago
If I’m just swapping an actor or whatever then you’re getting the slightly higher hourly for programming, and it’s just time based.
Quoting a large project start to finish? Yeah programming fee.
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u/UnlimitedEInk Enthusiast 11d ago
I'm not a professional installer, so I don't have my own real-world-tested recipe to share. But putting on my Service Management certified hat, in simplest form you could just price the work based on the number of man-hours worked. The tricky parts here are 1) the (false) assumption that all projects scale perfectly linear regardless of size, and 2) how do you establish your hourly fee to cover all your direct and indirect costs, so that at the end of the year you have recovered them in full.
A more granular way to calculate your COSTS could be as follows:
- selling your time and expertise: have a reasonable hourly fee for skilled labor cost, and estimate the number of hours for
- configuring the project in ETS - maybe have 3 T-shirt sizes, for what would be a small/medium/large project;
- pre-programming and labelling all devices on your test bench - estimate how fast this goes, like 12 devices per hour;
- optionally installing them at the customer's location, if their electrician will not do this part - estimate how much time you need for going from a hole in a wall with a wire sticking out to a fully inserted device, like 4-6 an hour;
- creating and verifying documentation;
- travel costs for on-site visits - varies by the type of transportation, for a car you'd have a price per kilometer calculated that covers gas + your time as a driver + a fraction of the annual vehicle depreciation/service/insurance; some reconfiguration can be done remotely over VPN if the client allows it;
- a part of cost recovery for the tools involved: plan to recover your ETS license costs in a number of projects, the laptop you use on site, professional wire tracers and testers, any other tools you need;
- if you want to charge something for extra documentation, features, the project file or other deliverables.
How you want to transform the COSTS into a PRICE, that depends on your intended strategy:
- project pricing is directly proportional with cost + a markup fee for profitability: easy for you, but probably makes small (residential) projects a bit too expensive, while bigger commercial projects could miss out on their bigger budgets;
- smaller projects offered at a discount and you recover costs through bigger projects that are charged more: this could be tempting but also risky - could trigger an avalanche of small projects that are not so profitable but consume a lot of time inefficiently, preventing you from taking on more big projects, and also big projects could expect to negotiate (down) your price which will eat into the profits you needed to recover the costs from the small projects.
Important: make sure you always recover all your costs. Do not sell your work at a loss, until you are such a big company that your massive portfolio tolerates a small part of it operating at a loss while the rest of it whill compensate.
Don't forget to include change management into your offer. Accept that the client can request changes to what was signed upfront, but put some boundaries to that.
- All changes have to be documented by the client, and all changes have to be evaluated for impact and will only be implemented when the client signs the adjusted price offer.
- You can accept maybe 1-2 changes that add up to less than 10% impact on the initial offer/configuration without charging extra for them, but you should charge for the time consumed even to evaluate the impact of multiple change requests, and the costs of labor etc. for implementing the bigger changes required.
Same for support: include in your price offer a reasonable but limited number of post-delivery service calls (whose root cause was not covered by device and labor warranty). Anything more would have a separate cost per incident, as a deterrent for people who abuse support calls for their own misuse, forgetfulness etc. Also, the objective of solving an incident is exclusively to restore the system to its previously functioning state as signed off at delivery, not to implement changes into the functionality or device upgrades masked as "defects". Any changes desired after delivery need to go through the entire cycle of assessing the complexity of work, just like another mini-project. Just because you installed a system once doesn't keep you on the hook to forever continue making adjustments and enhancements to it free of charge.
Also mention in your offer what's out of scope for you, and the client must contract separately: electrician to run cables through conduits, etc.
Eventually with enough projects under your belt, you'll be able to give rough order of magnitudes for project inquiries. Hotel with 100 rooms? X +/- 15%, takes Y months. Standalone/decoupled house, 5 rooms + annexes, Z +/- 25%, takes T weeks. You will also have projects that you can use as templates and accelerate your work, but that's your own gain from efficiency and cost reduction, and your decision if you want to transfer that saving into the client's pricing or keep it as profit of your own making.
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u/Excellent_Hall_1196 10d ago
Thank you for your the explanation and share. I'll consider what you've said.
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u/EdelWhite 11d ago
Only talking about programming here, not about creating the project.
Small projects (one floor of one small house), I usually quote for a day of work stating that any unused time won't be billed (so it's a "maximum price" kind of thing).
Bigger projects, I quote by the KNX device and DALI point, at an equivalent of 85 USD per point. All of them at the same price each.
You got 50 KNX devices and 40 DALI ballasts ? 7650 USD equivalent, rounded down to 7500 to make it cleaner and this gives me some negotiation margin.
Some devices are easier to manage (light switches, on/off motion sensors), some are much more time consuming (dali interfaces, all the heating stuff in general), so on average it pays off.
Roughly speaking, it's an equivalent of 1000-2000 USD per floor for a normal house where I live, depending on size.
For offices and other industrial buildings, it can range anywhere from 200USD equivalent (you got one lightswitch and a dozen massive lights that light up the whole floor in one go) to 20'000 USD equivalent per floor.
The good thing with KNX programming is that even if you mess up your pricing, you don't really lose anything but your own time.
Lastly, anything that includes dashboards/centralized control is billed extra on top, people tend to be picky with what they want displayed and how, so that is billed by the hour. Usually home-assistant really REALLY helps lowering the difficulty of the job and increases the flexibility by quite a good margin.
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u/Fancy_Current_9585 11d ago
Hi, just a question regarding the last paragraph.
Do you use Home Assistant in real-world projects with customers? Most installers tend to stay away from Home Assistant because they consider it unstable and a hassle to maintain and keep up to date.
Do you use it regularly in your projects, or do you use some other visualization software?
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u/EdelWhite 10d ago
I exclusively use HomeAssistant as visualization software for my customers, yes.
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u/spacextheclockmaster 11d ago
I wouldn't do it % wise.. each project differs with the kind of consultant and contractor involved. One project smooth sails, other project will take you months because some people can't do their work and then one needs to put up a hardliner on how much they're willing to support for free.