Unexpected costs with free plan

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Richard Sikora asked May 21, '21

Unexpected costs with free plan

Hi,

I think I had 5 machines running in standby because I tested out Playfab. Unfortunately I forgot to delete the build and I didn't know that they produce cost while running in standby.

Additionally, I thought that once the 750 free hours exceed I just can't use them anymore until I switch to the non-free plan or until the free hours are reset.

Now I see my current cost at $20.65. Is there a possibility to avoid this and set a an automatic limit that the machines are turned down for example once the free hours are gone?

Since, this was an acciden,t I kindly ask you to waive the costs incurred.

Thank you very much.

BR

limits test

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Answer 1 · 2021-05-21T01:45:35Z

brendan answered May 21, '21

For any questions on billing, please go ahead and contact our business team via the Contact Us form on the PlayFab main site (https://playfab.com/contact/).

To be clear, we provide a limited number of free CPU hours in our server hosting, as described in the pricing page, the docs, and the click-through page you have to use to activate server hosting in the Game Manager. When you activate a build by setting the number of Standby servers you want to have to anything more than zero, you are running virtual machines (VMs), which is why the documentation page linked above shows how to compute your costs, making sure to include your Standby servers.

Since we cannot know what your intent is for your testing, we do not forcibly shut down your servers when you're testing, so you do need to track your usage to make sure you're not exceeding any projected costs you need to keep your usage under. It's also worth noting that server usage time (we bill based on total minutes, so we don't round up to an hour if you only test for a few minutes then shut down the VMs) is accumulated when a VM stops, so usage at the end of one month may actually apply in the following month, if the VM stopped (either by you setting the Standby level to zero, or by the server cycling due to having been active for a few days) after the end of the month.

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Answer 2 · 2021-09-20T01:38:38Z

Andrew Bindon answered Sep 20, '21

Having had a similar experience I am not going to touch PlayFab with a 10 foot pole any longer.

I am on the "Free" plan, and just experimenting with setting up multiplayer servers.

I turned my back for a moment and a couple of days of my developer experiments have cost me £30 pounds.

So presumably that would be £450 pounds for a month. And I only had 3 players connecting.

I'm going to let all the public dev forums I can know about my experiences here. I'm amazed that other developers are not calling this out.

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