question

Sure thing:

1. Short answer: no. Longer answer: If you have a successful title with many users, I can't imagine not moving to the pro tier. The free tier has no SLA, and no 1-on-1 support. Also, the limits in the free tier are quite low - especially for the live ops capabilities (which is why we don't list them as really being available in the free tier - realistically, you don't have enough of them to make them viable). Basically, the free tier is there to help indies and hobbyists get their ideas out there. If those ideas take off, you really want to have an assurance that you won't have issues. While we work hard to make sure the service is stable for all titles, we can't provide dedicated resources to free or indie tier titles. So if you have a bug in your game or a hacker decides to try to mess with you such that you have traffic that isn't sustainable, our only option in those tiers is to move your title to a "low vertical" - basically, a quarantine space with lower resource availability, so that your title can't impact any other title in the service. For pro (and enterprise) tier titles, we have more options, and can move titles having issues to dedicated full verticals.

2. We bill based upon usage. In general, our MAU-based pricing is low enough that we're a fairly small percentage of revenue even on average-ARPDAU titles. In the pro (and enterprise) tier, we work with developers to help with any questions they have on feature usage, but also on live operations planning. We sponsored a full day of talks on this at the last Casual Connect in Seattle, and we're doing that again for the upcoming Casual Connect in Anaheim. Basically, we want titles to be successful. If your monetization is especially poor, we would work with you to try to find ways to improve it. But realistically, if your title is performing poorly and you can't find any way to change that, you should really be sunsetting it so that you can put your efforts into projects that stand a better chance of success.