Limits on essential tier
Hi, I am creating a simple single player unity 2d game. I would like to know some things.
1) the number of api calls per minute (or per day?) is there any limit on api calls?
2) actual cost of essential tier. (like is it free? do we have to pay something? believe me we would love to pay, because we dont want to take playfab for granted, it is a brilliant solution to many of my problems, cant stress enough how much we love it so far
3) If we are only using cloud scripts, players stats, leaderboard and loginswith specific devices( these are all liveops features right? are they free? actual limits on each service? is there any specific docmentation where we can find that out?
4) what should we expect to pay at the end of the month?
Best Answer
Great question, and one that can cause confusion, so I'll be as detailed as possible.
Obviously, nothing can be "unlimited", since resources are finite. What we've done is to set up limits in the service that help to prevent performance issues due to bad behavior, and those act as "burst limits". What that means is, for example, you could send a bunch of calls in rapid succession from a client - say, doing several data writes, a few reads, plus a couple of Cloud Script calls and VC purchases - all in a couple of seconds at the end of a game session. That wouldn't be an issue. But if you were to sustain that level of calls for an extended period of time, that would be. And again, this is all on a per-client basis - we're not concerned about millions of clients all making calls, as long as each one isn't making excessive calls. After all, we support millions of simultaneously connected clients today.
Costs on our side for the core service are largely driven by the size of data read/written, and the frequency. So what you should be thinking about is how to optimize your calls so that you're minimizing the frequency with which you hit the backend. Think along the lines of a few calls per minute, averaged over the lifetime of the player session. Again, bursts are fine, as long as they're infrequent.
As an aside, if your game design requires regular, higher frequency calls due to the need to have security on the gameplay, what you really need is to use custom game server hosting (whether hosted by us or elsewhere). That way, your servers can exchange data with the client at any rate you like, with your servers periodically updating the backend data for the players. Usually that's at the end of a session, but if your sessions run long, you'll want to do that update every minute or two.
Now, specific to your questions, that covers 1. For the others:
2. The core service is free in the Essentials tier. Content (CDN) usage and server hosting aren't part of that, as they're potentnailly unbounded in terms of usage per player.
3. You can find the limit differences between the free and paid tiers in this thread: https://community.playfab.com/questions/13455/limits-for-pro-tier.html. "LiveOps" is a much broader topic. Those features are certainly used as part of a total LiveOps plan, but so are many others. I'd recommend reading our LiveOps guide, which you can get from http://playfab.com.
4. If you're in our Essentials tier, not using CDN or server hosting, and you haven't selected any limit increases, nothing. The only things you would ever be billed for are things where you explicitly agree to spend money on them.
