We believe in a fair pay per usage model that is predictable and scalable. Therefore we decided to make the pricing based on our cost factors, which are costs for servers and traffic. The costs for servers can be converted to API calls which is used as our main driver for our pricing model.
Today we block your API calls when you are above 110% of your included contingent. This can cause problems when your website, mobile apps or services are not usable anymore because you underestimated the amount of traffic. Therefore we will make a few changes to our pricing model.
This changes will be coming at 5th of March 2020:
We will reduce the contingent for the free plan to 20.000 API calls per month.
Additional calls above the included limit will be charged. The pricing will be 0.2€ / 1000 API calls and you will receive an additional invoice at the end of the month for the extra calls. You will also receive an invoice when you have a yearly subscription, because we want to avoid a big surprise at the end of the billing period. The included contingent will be calculated per month, based on the last plan that is selected this month. This is already the case right now. This means that when you downgrade your plan in the middle of the month you might receive an additional invoice, even if you have not reached your contingent at the beginning of the month. But on the other side you can save money by upgrading your account to a bigger plan. Of course nothing changes when you just stay within your contingent.
We will also differentiate between included API calls and a blocking limit. Every additional API call above the blocking limit will be blocked. This protects you from unexpected costs, for example when you underestimate the traffic to your website or when your website is under attack. The blocking limit will be 3 times the included API calls for all paid plans and the same as the included API calls for the free plan, so in short:
We will also work on automated notifications to inform you when you are about to exceed your API limits. You can already create rules for that, but we think we need better solutions for that.
As mentioned at the beginning of this blog post, traffic is one of our cost drivers. The traffic has been converted to the included storage, but we had to introduce an upload limit to keep the traffic costs low. Therefore we will change our pricing model in the coming months from storage costs to traffic costs. All plans will have unlimited storage and unlimited asset sizes, but we will apply our rules for API calls to traffic then.