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Chris B. avatar image
Chris B. asked

Questions about the pricing system

Hello,

We just recently, about 2 weeks ago, noticed PlayFab had a new pricing system. I had suggested PlayFab to a fellow developer and mentioned how it was free but had limits.

However, it appears the limits have changed somewhat. I don't remember a limit on MAU for example. The old system I know how limits on amount of data and currencies and stuff like that, but seemed to allow as many users as you could get.

Currently, for work projects we have one live game that already has several thousand MAU (went live about a year ago). I think I saw some mention of being grandfathered in, so I guess this game is safe as long as we keep under the other limits.

We have another game that isn't live but we have hooked it into Playfab, so would this one fall under the new pricing with the limited MAU?

We also have another game that we haven't hooked into Playfab. I'm assuming this would fall under the new pricing?

None of our games would go over the other limits that are in the Limits tab in Playfabs dashboard. We worked very hard to keep them from going over those amounts when those limitations were introduced and in many cases, even stay way under the limit.

Just trying to get an idea of what is the best choices for our current and future games. Thank you for any answers provided.

pricing
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brendan avatar image
brendan answered

Actually, it's not new - all we did was remove the mix-and-match tier (since it wasn't a good value, and no one used it) and reformat the page.

Where are you seeing a MAU limit, exactly? The Pro tier does have a note that your billing only starts when your title has 1,000 registered player accounts ("live"), but that's not related to the Free tier in any way. Is the fact that the footnote isn't inside the Pro tier box causing a readability issue?

I will add, so that everyone's clear on this, that the Free tier has no service level agreement, and support is solely through the forums (in addition to the lower limits). We're committed to keeping the Free tier, as we want to help hobbyists and first-time indies get their start. But we have to be realistic that with zero revenue, we can't dedicate a lot of resources to it. We do everything we can to make sure titles in that tier don't run into any problems, but if there are issues, we're contractually obligated to make sure our pro/enterprise customers are unblocked first. Again, simply being realistic about this so that there's no confusion.

But because of that, I can't emphasize enough that if you're a full-time game developer of any kind, you should really be using the Pro tier, so that you have the higher limits (which allow you to fully enable automation of live operations for your games, among other things), and the assurance of an actual SLA with support options.

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Chris B. avatar image Chris B. commented ·

Well, we had never seen this pricing structure until the other developer I had talked to mentioned it. So from our prospective, it's new. It may not actually be new, and perhaps it just wasn't laid out like this, but I know for us at my job, we hadn't seen this structure before.

I guess my confusion is for how it is laid out. But I think I understand it now. The basic tier is free with limits under the limits tab (we also understand the limited support and such, that's fine, makes sense). But the pro is free till you hit 1000 mau. Basically, if you're ok with the free tier, you can stay in it as long as you stay within the limits, but the MAU doesn't matter.

When the other developer was telling me about it, I think we both misread it as your app is free till you hit 1k+ mau, to which you'd fall under the pro tier by default.

Granted, if we had a huge amount of MAU, we'd consider pro, but the income right now doesn't justify the cost related to pro. Still a growing game.

Thank you very much. I understand it now.

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brendan avatar image brendan Chris B. commented ·

Yes, we clearly haven't been great about how we messaged this, and we're working hard on being better about that. Thanks for the feedback!

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