Introducing Ably's new pricing model: Consumption-based, per-minute-billing, built for scale.
Our new per-minute, consumption-based pricing model offers granular control over your costs, eliminating the need to pay for peak users or connections. Whether you're building a proof of concept or handling massive user loads, our pricing model provides what you need to succeed - volume discounts, cost optimizations and business critical support.
Consumption-based pricing has become widespread in SaaS and PaaS businesses, and it's easy to understand why: you should only ever pay for what you consume.
Some consumption-based models, like Monthly Active Users (MAU) or monthly 'peak' models, can be less efficient. These models often force you to pay for unused capacity, which is especially costly for those with fluctuating workloads.
Addressing the limitations of traditional pricing models
At Ably, we recognized the limitations of our monthly ‘peak’ pricing model for our growing customer base, which spans a diverse range of industries (e.g.sports, media & entertainment, SaaS, education, and finance).
Even for customers with relatively stable workloads, we saw a degree of wastage. The old model diverted focus away from growth and innovation and onto cost, thereby limiting the user experience.
We know you expect more! Our vision was to create a new pricing model that was built for scale, was transparent and could efficiently accommodate all workload types.
Our vision for customer-first pricing
Having analyzed the merits of a number of models, including MAU, we knew there had to be a better way to address the needs of all our customer’s. So, we set ourselves the challenge of developing a pricing model that:
- Is customer first: A pricing model that’s designed for our customers' benefit, not our own. Ably's success is driven by your success, and our pricing should align with that.
- Minimizes wastage with granular billable unit abstractions: There is no “typical” user for billing purposes. Akin to what AWS did to revolutionize the “typical” server model, we want to ensure our customers pay for the resources they consume.
- Shares economies of scale: Ably is performing trillions of operations for billions of devices each month, which allows us to benefit from economies of scale. Like us, our customers expect to realize cost efficiencies as they scale.
- Provides cost optimization tooling: Customers succeed with Ably when they can increase the value from our service by optimizing spend on unit economics. Talking about this principle is not enough. Therefore we invested, and continue to invest, in features and tooling that help you optimize your costs.
Beyond peak usage: A more flexible pricing approach
Ably’s new pricing model, launched today, not only realizes this vision but builds upon it. Customers can focus on building scalable, high-performance realtime applications.
Key benefits include:
Consumption-based pricing. Billed by the minute.
Enjoy granular control over your costs. You only pay for what you use, and are charged for the time users are connected, the time that channels are active and the number of messages you send.
Increased capacity. Freedom to grow.
We have boosted the capacity of all our paid packages to ensure customers can scale applications without worrying about limits. And the number of messages you can send is limitless!
Volume discounts. Drive economies of scale.
The more you use the platform, the lower your unit costs become, ensuring we remain affordable - even at extreme scale. Ably's pricing is structured around three key usage metrics. Pay only for what you use. Benefit from volume discounts.
Full cost transparency. Predictable pricing.
Simple, straightforward billing based primarily on the duration connections and channels are used in minutes and the number of messages sent. We have exposed everything on our pricing page, so you know exactly how much you can expect to pay each month - no surprises.
Cost optimization. Maximize ROI.
Cost matters at scale. Therefore we are investing in features and tooling to help customers with cost optimization. A good recent example of this is our introduction of server-side message batching.
Let's say there's a big event in the livestream, such as a sports team scoring a goal or a musical artist playing a fan favorite song. Reactions will take place around the same time, so a lot of these events fire in very close succession.
Rather than send each reaction individually, we can queue them and send them in batches every 500ms or whatever time interval is appropriate.
New packages. Fit-for-purpose.
We have introduced two new self-serve packages for customers who need some of the features and support offered by our enterprise grade packages, but simply want to self serve - ‘Standard' and ‘Pro’.
- The Standard package is for when you’re ready to start rolling out your application into production. Included in the package is access to Ably support via email with a Service Level Agreement (SLA) of less than 1 business day for general guidance and for system impediments or system down.
- The Pro package is for when your business is growing and you need higher limits to accommodate this. Included in the package is access to Ably support via email with a Service Level Agreement (SLA) of less than 1 business day for general guidance and less than 2 business hours for system impediments or system down. In addition Pro customers can enjoy access to Datadog (Lite).
- Custom Enterprise packages come without limits, for infinite scale. Depending on your business-critical needs a host of features are included: HIPAA compliance, SAML and SCIM SSO, Multiple account support with organizations, Regional data constraints (e.g. to the EU or US), Custom CNAMEs, Private Link, dedicated clusters and more. Plus enhanced support features and SLAs
- Free forever package is ideal for when you are building a POC or simply want to trial Ably.
View our new pricing page for the full details.
