brainCloud Release 4.5 includes the official production release of our Custom Entities feature - which allows apps to be built with much larger and richer entity data collections.
Custom Entities, together with Chat and Messaging - form a trio of new features that greatly expand the capabilities of apps built upon brainCloud.
At the same time, heavy usage of these features has the potential to greatly increase server resource costs (memory + storage + backups).
To ensure that we enable devs to build ambitious apps while still balancing the cost / usage equation - we are introducing a new Deep Data Usage component to Plus Plan pricing.
---
To be clear - this only affects apps that are using Custom Entities, Chat and/or Messaging. It does not apply to data stored in Global Entities, User Entities, Group Entities, Global Files, User Files, etc. as these are not considered deep data.
---
Deep Data Usage Pricing
Deep Data Usage is charged for storage of Custom Entities, Messages and Chat History.
It is charged at a rate of $0.45 USD / GB / day, with specially weighted multipliers of x5 for data indexes and x10 for Redis-based data (i.e., chat history). Note that Plus Plans each includes an allocation of free deep data.
Some examples:
Custom Entities - a 100MB entity collection with 10MB of indexes for 30 days would equate to $2.25 / month (i.e. 4.5 GB)
Chat History - the history for 500 active chat channels with retention of 50 256-byte (plus overhead) messages each for 30 days is $2.88 / month (i.e. 5.76 GB). FYI the brainCloud overhead per chat message is 512 bytes.
Note that Messaging usage is calculated and costed the same as Custom Entities, by the total data + index storage used.
---
Plus Plans Required
To use Custom Entities, a Plus Plan will now be required. This is so that we can ensure a credit card is attached to the account in the event that usage billing applies.
The great news is that the Plus Plans have all been enhanced to include 10 GB of aggregated deep data usage per month for free!