Ably now prices on monthly active users (MAUs). One number, and one you already know: how many people used your app this month. Know that and you know what you'll pay, before you've written a line of code and however busy those users turn out to be.
If you're an existing customer and wondering what this means for you: nothing changes unless you want it to. Your pricing stays as it is. The rest of this post is why we've done it and how it works.
Why users, not resources
Infrastructure is usually priced on consumption: queries, compute, storage. That's because the provider can only see how much you use, not what that usage is worth to you. Software used directly by people is usually priced per user, because headcount is something customers can forecast and budget for.
Ably sits between the two. It's infrastructure underneath, powering experiences end users interact with directly. Until now, we priced it like infrastructure. From today, Ably prices by monthly active user. That makes your costs far easier to predict and budget for. What you pay now scales with the value you get, which is largely how many people you serve, at a price that holds up at any scale.
We've argued the other side of this before. Metering connection minutes, messages and channels is more precise, but it's also volatile. The more engaging your app became, the more unpredictable your bill got. That’s what we wanted to address.
Build more, pay the same
This is the part I'm most excited about.
We've heard it many times: a team wanted to add typing indicators, presence, a live cursor, some small realtime touch that would've made the product better, and held back because of what it would add to the bill. That's the last thing we want.
On MAU the price doesn't move with which products your users use or how much (within the fair usage that comes with every package.) Add Chat, LiveObjects, Spaces or push notifications and your bill stays where it was. Same for AI Transport: agents and servers aren't users, so you pay for the person who got the answer, not the tokens it took to deliver it. We want what you want: more of your users getting more from your product.
If you're already an Ably customer
Nothing changes for your account. If you're on resource-based pricing you stay on your current package, limits and terms, and we've no plans to change that. The one thing to know: if you change your package online from here, the packages on offer are MAU packages. Want to move sooner? Do it from your dashboard whenever you like. Estimate from your user count, or set a clientId on your end-user connections and your dashboard will show your actual MAU within a month. If you have a managed contract, talk to your customer success manager.
How we count
An MAU is a person who actually used your app through Ably this month, identified by the clientId you set when they connect (one line in the SDKs), counted once however often they return. Servers and agents don't count. And because we count people who connect rather than people who have an account, if realtime powers one screen in a much larger product you pay for the people who open that screen, not your whole user base. The detail is in the pricing FAQ.
Priced to make sense at any scale
Start free. The Free package covers 500 monthly active users, which gets you further than you'd think, so build something and see your real numbers before you pick a package. Self-serve prices are published up to 50,000 users, and we've priced them to be competitive with any comparable platform.
Beyond that, we design your MAU rate around how your users actually behave, so that choosing Ably is the right commercial decision at that scale as well as the right technical one.
That's the point of this model: Ably should make sense at any size, from a weekend project to the largest realtime audiences in the world. If you're at the big end, get in touch.
Pricing at a glance, billed annually: Free up to 500 MAU. Pro from $29 a month for 1,000 users, down to 2.3 cents per user per month at 50,000. Every price is published at ably.com/pricing.
