Is there no free service for playtesting?

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Britton Bailer asked Jul 13, '21

Is there no free service for playtesting?

I'm new to PlayFab and joined because it seemed like a great tool to use for my game I am building. It sounded to me like it was free to use while you were still under a certain limit of hours/servers/players/etc. I was hoping to get set up with PlayFab and be able to test my game and finish developing it while running on PlayFab servers, but while trying to get the server set up on my account, I'm greeted with the message saying "$0.20/hour". Is there no way to do extremely small scale playtesting for free with PlayFab? Or is any running server, no matter how many hours/players/etc going to cost money?

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Answer 1 · 2021-07-13T02:09:26Z

brendan answered Jul 13, '21

We provide a limited number of free CPU hours in our server hosting, as described in the documentation: Billing for PlayFab Multiplayer Servers 2.0 - PlayFab | Microsoft Docs. All use beyond that is charged at the normal rates in all tiers.

Many developers get through all their development - and sometimes even alpha/beta tests using only the free CPU hours we provide, but you do have to be conscious of the hours you're using.

1. Bear in mind that a 2-core machine uses 2 CPU hours per real world hour. An 8 core uses 8 CPU hours, etc. That's reflected in the information provided in the Game Manager, if you're choosing one of the VM models where we provide those free CPU hours.

2. Make sure you turn off your VMs when you're not using them by setting all regions to 0 Standby. If you leave servers running in Standby Mode, that means you're leaving VMs running.

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Britton Bailer commented · Jul 13, 2021 at 08:03 PM

Hello Brendan! Thanks so much for the response! If I was getting a notice of the cost of the servers, does that mean I was doing something wrong then? Nothing I'm doing for now should exceed the number of free CPU hours, so I'm just confused why I was getting the payment notice. Or is that charge just on there and wont actually be applied to my account unless I exceed the free hours?

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brendan Britton Bailer commented · Jul 13, 2021 at 08:09 PM

Correct - the build configuration shows you the cost for running servers to make sure it's clear that you will be charged for any usage over the included free core hours. Since you can have multiple builds running at the same time, and you can scale up the number of servers you have running on any one of those, there's no way we could say that all usage of a particular configuration will be free.

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