Pricing that matches what realtime actually costs
Why we bill on smoothed peak-CCU with a player-hours guard instead of MAU — and how cheap egress lets us undercut the incumbents.
We looked hard at billing per monthly active user. For realtime games, it’s the wrong unit.
MAU is decoupled from cost
Two games, both 10,000 MAU:
- Game A: two minutes a month each → essentially free to run.
- Game B: five hours a day, 2,000 players concurrent at peak → a serious server bill.
Same MAU, a 100× spread in cost-of-goods. Price for the average and Game B bankrupts you; price for the worst case and the casual studios leave. That’s adverse selection.
What we bill on instead
Peak concurrent users (CCU), smoothed. It maps directly to the thing your infra is sized for — simultaneous rooms — and it’s the market’s habit from the incumbents. We bill on a sustained peak (a high percentile, not the single worst spike) so one streamer moment never blows up your invoice.
A player-hours allowance rides along on every tier as a margin guard — it quietly catches the session-heavy whales a pure-CCU plan would miss. Both dimensions come from the same usage ledger, so it’s one instrumentation, not two.
Why we can be generous
Playband runs on Oracle Cloud, where the first 10 TB of egress each month is free — and egress is the cost killer for a realtime relay. That margin goes straight into a fat free tier (100 CCU, not the ~20 you’re used to) and lower paid tiers than the incumbents.
Honest metering, predictable bills, and a free tier you can actually ship on.