Build
Usage, limits and billing
How usage is counted, what the plans include, and what happens at a limit or a spend cap.
Plans#
| Hobby | Pro, €20 a month | Pro, past the allowance | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Who | Personal and non-commercial projects | Teams and anything commercial, any team size | |
| Realtime messages | 100 million | 250 million | €1 per million |
| Users and agents | 50,000 | 50,000 | €6 per 1,000 |
| Emails | 3,000 | 10,000 | €1 per 1,000 |
| Room minutes | 3,000 | 10,000 | €0.40 per 1,000 |
| Recording minutes | 60 | 300 | €4 per 1,000 |
| Past the allowance | Pauses at 110% | Billed; €200 spend limit on by default |
A user or agent counts in a month when they use your app at least a day after signing up; sign-ups who never come back are free. Prices exclude VAT. Enterprise agreements add volume prices, invoicing, an SLA and a dedicated region. Full details on the pricing page.
How realtime is counted#
| What happens | Counts as |
|---|---|
| Your app sends an event (a message, an update) | 1 message, plus 1 per further started 64 KiB |
| An AI answer streams, start to end | 1 message, however many chunks (again past 10,000 events or 10 MiB) |
| A presence update up to 4 KiB (cursor, typing) | a tenth of a message |
| Delivery to readers, reads, reconnects, open connections, retries of the same post, rejected events | nothing |
Every post answers with what it counted, for example "billed": { "messages": 1, "presence": 0, "runs": 0, "run_events": 0 }, so you can see the cost while you build. The Console shows realtime by day and exports CSV.
At a limit#
Hobby#
At 80% of an allowance the Console warns you; past 100% it shows you are over. At 110% that kind of new usage pauses until the month turns or you upgrade: new messages, new users, sending email, or new rooms and recordings. Reads and everything else keep working, and it resumes within a minute of upgrading.
{ "ok": false, "error": "free_limit_reached", "realm": "acme", "hint": "…" }Pro#
Pro never pauses at the allowance; usage past it is billed at the prices above. It starts with a €200 spend limit on those charges, which the owner can change or remove under Usage & billing. When the month’s charges reach it, only what adds charges pauses (same response as above), until the month turns or the limit goes up.
Fair use#
Each realm may post up to 1,000 events a second on Hobby and 10,000 on Pro, averaged over two seconds. Past it the relay refuses the post; nothing is stored or counted, and the SDK resends after the Retry-After delay.
{ "ok": false, "error": "rate_limited", "realm": "acme", "limit_per_sec": 1000, "hint": "…" }Billing#
Pro is charged at the start of each calendar month (UTC), the first month pro rata; usage past the allowance at the end. Stripe charges the card and emails the invoice; invoices, the card and cancelling are in the billing portal, linked from the Console.