PlayFab Free Tier Billing Summary Bug

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Travis Lange asked Apr 4, '21

PlayFab Free Tier Billing Summary Bug

I am currently on the free tier. My billing summaries have all of a sudden started showing charges of $100+ dating all the way back to May 2020 (the farthest back it will let me check). However, my card has never been charged (which is good). I'm assuming this is just a UI bug on a new update to the PlayFab portal? I just wanted to check with you guys to confirm. We are on the Free Tier and as a result, I don't believe we should be getting charged anything.

And this leads to another question:

I noticed that the charges are related to our usage of Dasv2 servers. I see we are now supposed to upgrade to Dv4 servers. When I try to, it doesn't let me. These are my only options:

So to summarize:

1. I'm assuming that because I'm on the free tier, I can ignore those charges in the Billing Summary? Are those either a visual bug, or for your internal use?

2. The PlayFab portal is not letting me upgrade to the Dv4 servers.

Thanks for the help! :)

pricing

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Answer 1 · 2021-04-04T18:52:21Z

brendan answered Apr 4, '21

We detail our pricing in the pricing page (https://playfab.com/pricing) and documentation (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/gaming/playfab/features/pricing/pricing-overview), but to reiterate: All tiers can have Development Mode titles, but the free tier is limited to only Development Mode titles. In Development Mode, you're limited to 100,000 total player accounts, and the Core services are free. CDN use, Party use, and game server hosting are not free in Development Mode, though we provide a limited number of free hours of Party and free core hours of game server hosting in specific server models and regions, for testing. For each, any use outside the free amount is charged at our normal rates. Looking at your titles, you have a number of VMs running in game server hosting, so it does look like you'll have non-zero billing on your next invoice. If your game isn't live, one thing I'd recommend is to make sure you're setting the Standby level to 0 for any active regions, so that you're not running VMs when you're not actively testing.

For 2, to change or add quota for a server model in a region, you can use the Change Quota button on the Quota tab.

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Travis Lange commented · Apr 04, 2021 at 07:16 PM

Ok I think I understand. So the Dv2 models recently became "premium" VMs. Premium as in you have to pay for them and they aren't free.

What does that mean for our previous invoices? Where we were using the Dv2 models while they were free? If shows us incurring charges which is strange because when I was keeping track during those invoices, it showed me as being within the free limit.

Also, we have never been billed. Although the invoices are there. What do the past invoices mean?

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brendan Travis Lange commented · Apr 05, 2021 at 09:12 AM

No, that is incorrect. We have always charged for game server hosting - that has never changed. The recent update was to change the limited free hours we provide each month to the Dasv4 server model.

As stated in our blog post (https://blog.playfab.com/blog/azure-playfab-multiplayer-servers-includes-free-monthly-amd-vms-usage-evaluation) pre-existing titles before the change will continue to get Av2 and Fsv2 free hours through the end of June, so that they can easily make the transition before then.

If your previous invoices showed no charges for server usage, I would have to assume that either a) you didn't use more than the free hours, on the specified server models and in the specified regions, or b) there was a bug preventing billing.

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Travis Lange brendan commented · Apr 05, 2021 at 05:16 PM

Thanks for getting back with me Brendan. We have never received an invoice for the charges we were incurring. We would have changed the way we operate so as to not incur charges had we received an invoice. Because of this, I would like to request that our bills be forgiven / wiped clean.

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