# Costs

> Estimate the hardware investment and recurring operating cost categories for a deployment in your own datacenter.

This page describes a baseline production-grade deployment in your own datacenter as of 2026. Actual costs vary by vendor, region, existing contracts, and operating model. Your IT organization or solutions integrator is responsible for hardware procurement, datacenter setup, and ongoing operations. Unity doesn't invoice these costs. A deployment in your own datacenter usually requires a higher upfront infrastructure investment than a deployment on a managed Kubernetes service, but it can offer lower recurring infrastructure costs over time depending on your operating model and existing IT capabilities.

> **Note:**
>
> Unity provides the Unity platform licensing and, if you use transformations, the Unity Asset Transformer SDK license. Both are separate from the infrastructure costs on this page.

## Indicative hardware requirements

|           **Item**           |                           **Description**                          |
| :--------------------------: | :----------------------------------------------------------------: |
|        Compute servers       |   3 enterprise rack servers with 24–32 cores and 256 GB RAM each   |
|            Storage           |        8–12 TB enterprise NVMe or all-flash usable capacity        |
|          Networking          |             10/25 GbE switching, firewall, and cabling             |
| Backup and disaster recovery |               Backup appliance or backup integration               |
|   UPS and power protection   |                Rack UPS and related power equipment                |
|         Optional GPU         | NVIDIA L4 or equivalent, where transformation workloads require it |

## Monthly operating cost categories

Plan for the following recurring costs:

* Power and cooling
* Rack space or colocation
* Software and platform subscriptions
* Hardware support and maintenance
* Backup and off-site retention
* Network and operational overhead

To size your deployment for your usage profile, [contact Unity](https://unity.com/contact-us).

## Additional resources

* [Benefits and considerations of your own datacenter](../overview#benefits-and-considerations-of-your-own-datacenter)
* [Sizing variables](./hardware-requirements.md#sizing-variables)
* [What the release installs and what you provide](./infrastructure.md#what-the-release-installs-and-what-you-provide)
* [Introduction to licensing](../../admin/licensing/licensing-introduction)