Announcing Commercial Pricing

[Fang_Chang]

Hi all,

To all those eager to hear about our pricing, I'm pleased to be able to share this with you all.  As of today, the LiveCycle Collaboration Service (LCCS) is available for purchase on a "pay-per-use" model -- worldwide!

Dimension	Price	Description
Live Stream Bandwidth	$0.49 USD per GB	Up/down live stream bandwidth, such as real-time audio and video. P2P stream via RTMFP is excluded though LCCS will gracefully switch connection methods if a P2P connection cannot be established or maintained.
Push Messages	$0.10 USD per 1K	Push messages are data messages in to the service. Data messages out are excluded. Some examples of data messages include chat messages and shared cursors. Push messages assist in collaborative workflows between clients.
User Minutes	$0.01 USD per Hour	User minutes is the amount of time that a connection is maintained to the service. If there are 3 connections maintained over a 5 minute period, the total user minutes for that session is 15 minutes.

Note: Though multiple currencies are supported and your payment card will be charged in the appropriate currency, the developer portal interface and billing emails will be in English and USD only.

For more detailed information around our pricing model, please see the attached FAQ.  Sign up now for a free account and/or upgrade your account now via our developer portal.

For those who we can't get anything past, we'll explain the rebranding later...

Thanks,

Fang

[coulix]

Great congratulation !

One question how could we see our quota usage in chat and presence message vs the rest ?

- Our 'Test' Edoboard button may stay to try the plateforme 'interface' only without AFCS connection.We were using AFSC even for the non shared demo.

- The largest cost is connection time, we should add a 5 min inactivity timer to auto disconnect the user.

hum .. I was reading 1cens a minute my bad.

Otherwise it seems very afordable great !

Greg

[daminee80]

Will you offer a plan that is suitable for high usage clients.  I plan to use the service for hours a day, with 30 - 100 concurrent users at a time.  In that case the current pricing but not be that reasonable.  It might be more affordable to go with a connect pro pricing plan.  I think there should be an unlimited usage plan for example 100 concurrent users unlimited meetings or at least something similar.

[Jinni_Cao]

Great congratulations to LCCS team!

BTW, are there any new features available along with 1.0 SDK released?

I checked the release notes but only found the update for 0.94 and earlier.

Thanks!

Jinni

[Hironmay]

Hi ,

There are some bug fixes and whiteboard enhancements as far as SDK is concerned. There are new examples on whiteboard demonstrating them.

Thanks

Regards

Hironmay Basu

[David_Welch]

Can you give an example of how the "Live Stream Bandwidth" cost (non-P2P) would be applied, i.e.:

  - 1 host and 1 participant using video for ten minutes streams X amount of up and down bandwidth, costing $XX

  - 1 host and 1 participant using video AND audio for xx minutes...costs $XX

Also, where does the whiteboard fit in this, as a "Push Message"?  If so, an example cost of using Whiteboard, if applicable.

I think this would be very helpful for those (like me) who aren't familiar with the type and amount of actual data passing through the service.

[Nigel_Pegg]

Hi DB,

I think the best way to try this out is to use the Room Console, available in the developer tools tab of the SDK Navigator. Log into a room, and check out the "Logs" tab. Run and user your application on the same room, and watch the graphs and message count being displayed there. Note that the bandwidth graph is only the bandwidth down for one client, so you'll want to multiply it by the number of users you may have logged in for the final result.

Hope this helps,

nigel

[RickBullotta]

Hi, Fang/Nigel.

Any further thoughts on "behind the firewall" deployments of ALCS?

Thanks,

Rick Bullotta

Burning Sky Software

[izunna]

why is the live stream bandwidth showing when my application does not have any video or audio? I was just testing the app and under live stream bandwidth it says 0.003 GB ?

Also about the user per minute section it says $0.01 per hour per user

so if user one connected @ 8am and user two connected at @ 8:30am @ 8:59am will this account be billed $0.01 for each user or will it only bill the one who has been on for an hour ? I'm trying to understand how this will work for application where you have users going in and most may not even stay for an hour...

[Raff_]

Bandwidth is bandwidth is bandwidth (and the term "live stream bandwidth" is confusing.

We count the size of the data sent and received (including data messages), so if for example you are transferring images as data messages they will count as bandwidth used.

User time is calculated as the total connection time of each user, so if you have one user connected for an hour and then another user joins for 30 minutes you will have 1h 30m of user time. Also, we bill for the total connection time for the month, so if you have users connecting to the rooms for only a few minutes at a time they will still contribute to your total connection time for the month and you will be billed for it.

Of course if you don't convert any application to "paid" you can still use the system for the equivalent of $15 of usage per month, so the best thing to understand how the pricing model work is to run some test application and check the usage.

[izunna]

Thanks for the reply. I did run one of the chat application i'm developing through the system and it will be nice to have list of actions that might count as push message. E.g I only tested the application connecting to the server and the application connecting to one collectionnode. But it says  my push message is 254. So does this mean connecting to the server counts towards your push message count?. .. I didn't send any chat message. Just login and log out few times.

[Nigel_Pegg]

Hi Izunna,

You will incur a little bit of messaging hit for joining the room and publishing your presence (UserManager pushes a message to others in the room). A list of messages incurred by the framework itself is a good idea - we'll look into getting that documented. In general, it should be a pretty tiny amount of your cost.

thanks

nigel

[whomzour]

Hi,

so AFCS is no longer free ?

Regards

fox

[Raff_]

We still have a free offering available for development and non-commercial use. With the new quota system you get $15 worth of free usage a month and if you need more or you want to bring your application commercial you can upgrade your account and select which applications you want to pay for and the maximum montly payment / usage you are willing to incur.

[Mickey79]

I am planning a video chat app, and this seems to be an affordable solution. Please confirm my calc.

A room with 8 users, 1 user is multicasting to 7 others during 2 minutes. That is 8 streams altogether. Video is at 160 kbps, so here we go:

8 streams * 160kbps * 120 seconds = 153 600 kbit / 8 bit = 19 200 kbyte = 18 Megabyte

18 Megabytes is not that bad.

[David_Welch]

Great, thanks for the post! And, with P2P, almost nothing!

David

[Fang_Chang]

Hi Mickey,

Yes - your calculation is correct.  The other pricing dimensions are additive though it should be inconsequential for your use case.  For example in user minutes, you have 8 users who are connected for 2mins, which results in a total of 16 user minutes.

As for P2P, DBWelch is correct -- you can alleviate your bandwidth costs by taking advantage of P2P streaming.  However, there is a logical limit (see this thread here - http://forums.adobe.com/thread/536673?tstart=30) to avoid taxing clients.  We automatically switch from P2P to Hub-and-spoke so you can just always request P2P so when the number of connections is below the logical limit, you won't incur any bandwidth costs.

Thanks,

Fang

[Mickey79]

Wow, thanks guys. That is massively awesome.

So basically, I wont even need to build a separate solution for Adobe Stratus to use P2P, but it is built into LCCS.

Fantastic.

Thanks!

[Thresholdsoftwa]

Hi All,

Below is our usage report for the LCCS. Can some one help me understand how adobe arrived at the figure $0.17 little confused with the push messages.

Description	Units
Live Stream Bandwidth	0.030 GB
Push Messages	1239
User minutes	188 minutes
Total	$0.17

How many concurrent users are supported at any given point of time?

Thanks in advance.

Regards

Thresholdsoft

[Fang_Chang]

Hi Thresholdsoft,

Sorry -- I'm not sure what your question is.  Concurrent users isn't a dimension that we meter against.

0.030GB * $0.49/GB + 1239Msgs*$0.10/1K Msgs + 188Mins*$0.01/60Mins = $0.17

Thanks,

Fang

[Thresholdsoftwa]

Thanks for the reply Fang.

My other question was about.

Let us suppose we are conducting a training session, is there any limit on the number of users who can log-in?

Thanks

Thresholdsoft