Pricing overview
Ably prices on Monthly Active Users (MAUs). You only pay for the number of unique users that interact with your application each month.
For full pricing details, refer to the pricing page.
Monthly Active Users (MAUs)
A monthly active user is a unique user who interacts with your app in a calendar month. Ably identifies users by clientId, and does not count servers and agents:
- A user who returns any number of times in the same month counts as a single MAU.
- The same user active in two different months counts as one MAU in each of those months.
- If you have anonymous users in your application, you need to generate a random
clientIdfor each. - MAUs are counted as being distinct within each individual Ably app, not across your account.
What you pay for
With a Pro or Business package, your price is based on three things that you choose:
- Your package, which determines the features, SLAs and support you receive.
- Your MAU allowance, which is the number of MAUs you expect to need each month.
- Your billing frequency, which is whether you pay monthly or annually.
Package
Ably offers four packages. Your package determines the features, SLAs and support that you receive. The price you pay comes from the MAU allowance you purchase with Pro or Business, or via a custom contract for Enterprise packages.
| Package | Description |
|---|---|
| Free | Experiment with Ably or build a proof of concept. Includes 500 MAUs each month, with no credit card required. |
| Pro | The entry level paid package for rolling out to production. Select an MAU allowance and pay a single price. |
| Business | The premium package. Adds features such as a HIPAA BAA, SOC 2 report download, branded Ably subdomains, regional routing constraints and accelerated support times. |
| Enterprise | A custom package tailored to your specific business needs. |
MAU allowance
With a Pro or Business package, you select the number of MAUs you expect to need each month as your MAU allowance, and pre-pay a single monthly price for them.
| MAUs | Pro (annual) | Pro (monthly) | Business (annual) | Business (monthly) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1,000 | $29 | $35 | $349 | $419 |
| 5,000 | $129 | $155 | $499 | $599 |
| 10,000 | $249 | $300 | $699 | $839 |
| 25,000 | $599 | $720 | $1,199 | $1,439 |
| 50,000 | $1,149 | $1,380 | $1,999 | $2,399 |
If you need more than 50,000 MAUs, contact us to discuss a custom package.
Additional MAUs
If you exceed your MAU allowance in a month then you will be billed for additional MAUs.
Regardless of whether you're on Pro or Business, additional MAUs are charged at a fixed rate of $0.05 per MAU and invoiced monthly in arrears. Your application is never blocked or throttled for exceeding your MAU allowance, however you can configure billing alerts to notify you when your MAUs or your spend pass a threshold in the month.
Billing frequency
Choose monthly billing to spread your payments evenly across the year, paying for your package and MAU allowance at the beginning of each month, with the ability to cancel at any time.
Choose annual billing and pre-pay for 12 months at a discounted rate, which is approximately two months free on Pro or Business with any MAU allowance.
Your MAU allowance is granted each month and the $0.05 additional MAU rate is invoiced at the end of every month, regardless of whether you are on monthly or annual billing.
How MAUs are counted
Ably counts an MAU whenever a clientId connects to Ably, or makes a request, from a user's device. The way you assign clientIds therefore determines what you are billed for:
- Use one
clientIdper user, and the sameclientIdfor that user on every device and in every session. A user who connects from a phone and a laptop with differentclientIds counts as two MAUs. - Don't share a
clientIdbetween users. - Every device must have a
clientId. A device that connects without one is rejected. Embed theclientIdin the token that your auth server issues, so that users can't claim another user's identity.
Ably knows whether a connection or request comes from a device or from one of your servers by the SDK package it uses. Install the device package in your applications and the server package on your servers. Clients created from the server package are excluded from the MAU count, as are agents created with the AI Transport SDK.
If you call the REST API directly, or use a custom realtime client, declare your servers explicitly. With API key authentication, add clientType=server as a request or connection parameter. With token authentication, add the x-ably-clientType claim with the value server to the JWT you issue to the server. Requests and connections that don't declare a side are counted as a user.
Clients using the protocol adapters are counted as follows:
- MQTT clients are counted as users unless their
clientIdbegins withserver-. - Pusher clients are always counted as users, because Pusher server libraries don't open realtime connections.
- PubNub clients are counted as users unless their
uuidbegins withserver-, or they declareclientType=serverin an auth token.
Limits
Limits protect your account against accidental or deliberate abuse, and protect the platform as a whole. The specific limits that apply depend on your package.
Pro and Business packages are also subject to a Fair Usage Policy, which covers the small number of accounts whose usage pattern is a sustained outlier.
Billing
It is important to understand how, and when, you are billed.
For Pro and Business packages, you pay for your MAU allowance in advance and for any additional MAUs in arrears. Invoices are issued on the first of each month. Enterprise packages are billed by invoice against a committed annual spend.