Pricing Meters

PlayFab's pricing is calculated from a set of consumption-based meters. This page outlines and defines the full set of PlayFab's pricing meters and how they're measured and calculated. For more information on PlayFab's pricing model, see the PlayFab pricing overview.

Core Meters

PlayFab Events, Profile, and Content & Configuration are the services that make up the core PlayFab product. Most PlayFab features use of a mix of functionality across the core services and accrue usage against one or more core meters.

Events

View and take action on your game's real-time data. Events can be generated in two ways. Standard events are automatically generated by PlayFab Game Services APIs and written to the event pipeline. Custom events can be created to trigger specific actions within the event pipeline.

• PlayStream Events - PlayStream unifies your game data into a single stream and allows you to trigger player engagement actions. These events show up in the PlayStream Monitor to provide real time visualization of event data. For more information, see PlayStream Event Model reference.
• Telemetry Events - Telemetry events are custom events that bypass PlayStream and go straight to the data warehouse. For more information, see PlayStream Events - Write Telemetry Events.

[!NOTE] Events are metered in 1 KB blocks against average event size. For example, 10 events with an average size of 2 KB are billed as 20 events, while 10 events with an average size of 0.5 KB are billed as 10 events.

Example: Weighted Events Calculation

To get a better understanding of how weighted meters are calculated, let's take a look at a sample title's PlayStream Events consumption for the previous month:

By adding up the total size (110 KB) and dividing by the total count (100), we get an average size of 1.1KB. Therefore, we need to multiply the total count by 1.1 to get the effective count of 110 PlayStream Events. Let's look at the same example with some adjusted numbers:

By adding up the total size (90 KB) and dividing by the total count (100), we get an average size of 0.9KB. Therefore, we don't multiply the total count by anything - we stick with 100 PlayStream Events, even though the player_executed_cloudscript event had an average size larger than 1KB.

Profile

There's nothing more important to the success of your games than your players. The Profile is what helps you understand and engage with your players - it includes any stored data related to player profile, entity profile, character profile, groups membership, and inventory. Data reads, writes, and storage are billed as part of this metered service.

• Reads - Metered based on the total number of reads to profile data that are processed by PlayFab. For a list of read APIs, see Profile read APIs. This meter is weighted to 1KB.
• Writes - Metered based on the total number of writes (and deletes) that are processed by PlayFab. For a list of write APIs, see Profile write APIs. This meter is weighted to 1KB.
• Storage - Metered based on the average total volume of profile data hosted by PlayFab across daily snapshots.

Content & Configuration

Content & Configuration files are used to remotely manage configuration for your game. You can update game content remotely in real-time (or on a schedule), and deliver personalized news and events that keep players coming back for more. Content & Configuration files include the following items: entity files, actions, rules, scheduled tasks, matchmaking, push notifications, emails, and title news. Content & Configuration files are a set of key/value pairs that are primarily used to manage configuration for your game remotely. Files data reads, writes, and storage are billed as part of this metered service.

• Reads - Metered based on the total number of files data reads that are processed by PlayFab. For a list of read APIs, see Content & Configuration read APIs. This meter is weighted to 10 KB.
• Writes - Metered based on the total number of files data writes (and deletes) that are processed by PlayFab. For a list of write APIs, see Content & Configuration write APIs.
• Storage - Metered based on the average total volume of files data hosted by PlayFab across daily snapshots.

Service-specific Meters

The following services are metered directly in addition to any usage they accrue against core meters.

CloudScript

CloudScript enables you to use client code to request execution of any custom server-side functionality you can implement. It enables you to build server-side logic and functionality that scales to meet your demand, without worrying about servers or infrastructure. Both total number of CloudScript executions and corresponding execution time are billed as part of this metered service.

• Execution Time - CloudScript execution time is metered based on the per-second resource consumption across all CloudScript executions, measured in GB-s (average memory size in GBs x total execution time in milliseconds).

  Note

  The minimum billable memory size and execution time per execution is 128MB and 100ms, respectively.

• Total Executions - Total number of ExecuteFunction API calls that are processed by PlayFab, including ones triggered by actions, rules, and scheduled tasks. For more information on the ways executions can occur, see Server-Side Cloud Script - Execution Function, Actions & Rules, and Scheduled Tasks.

Insights

Real-time analytics give you immediate insight into a game's performance and potential issues. Insights include services such as the performance of the data warehouse, long-term storage of data, custom visualization technology, managed external data sources or specialized data projects. The total combined usage of Insights products, represented by an aggregate value ("Insights Credits"), is billed as part of this metered service. Insight Credits are derived from conversion rates for usage of each Insight service.

• Insights Credits - The total number of Insights Credits used across all Insights products. For a detailed breakdown of how Insights Credits are calculated, see Insights Pricing.

Multiplayer Servers

PlayFab Multiplayer Servers deliver secure and reliable low-latency gameplay at global scale. Multiplayer Servers facilitate interoperable multiplayer infrastructure and cross-network gameplay, and allow you to operate a dynamically scaling pool of custom game servers in Azure.

• Virtual Machine Instance Hours - The hours of virtual machine time that your game servers use, including overhead hours generated by standby servers and virtual machine fragmentation. Price varies by datacenter, virtual machine and container selection. For more information, see Multiplayer Servers detailed price sheet.
• Network Egress - The volume of data transmitted by your game servers to the Internet (in gigabytes). Network egress is billed depending on the originating datacenter. Price varies by zone.

Party

PlayFab Party is a low-latency chat and data communication solution for cross-platform and cross-device multiplayer games. The voice and text features in Party can be used as a standalone chat solution or in conjunction with other features in PlayFab's Multiplayer product. There are four key meters used to bill Party utilization:

• Party Connectivity: Metered by number of player minutes connected to a network. Metering starts when a player creates a network or joins a network, and it stops when they have disconnected.
• Party Voice: Metered by number of player minutes speaking. When a player is connected to a network and is actively speaking, that player voice activity is measured and metered.
• Party Cognitive Services: Metered by number of player minutes using Speech to Text, Text to Speech, or Translation features.
• Party Network Egress This is data sent from PlayFab's relay and voice servers. This is congruent to the aggregate amount of data that players receive from the network. Data sent via peer-to-peer connections doesn't pass through PlayFab's relay networks and doesn't accrue to the Party Network Egress meter.

You can also use this Party pricing calculator to estimate your monthly bill based on your projections.

Economy v2

PlayFab Economy v2 is a massively scalable read-oriented service that can handle hundreds of millions of active players with large inventories and catalogs.

• Inventory Reads: Metered by API calls that read from Player Inventories. Reads are the cheapest calls to make, and with smart caching on your clients and backend can power scalable games for low cost.
• Inventory Writes: Metered by API calls that write to Player Inventories. Writes are substantially more expensive and so it makes sense to batch and delay them in your game backend where possible.
• Catalog Meters: Metered by API Requests and Storage, Catalog pricing is based around both storing binary content and metadata on PlayFab to serve to game clients as well as requests to get data.

Additional resources

• For the most up-to-date view of prices per meter, see PlayFab pricing
• See Consumption Best Practices to learn how to maintain the lowest rate of meter usage and cost for your game