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Announcing Commercial "Pay-per-Use" Pricing

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Former Community Member

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!

DimensionPriceDescription
Live Stream Bandwidth$0.49 USD per GBUp/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 1KPush 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 HourUser 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

48 Replies

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Level 1

Can I send video as binary data using NetGroup or BinaryPublisher? Will I be able to use P2P? Thanks!

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Employee

I am not sure I understand your question completely.

BinaryPublish publishes a binary "file" to our temporary local repository, so while you can upload a small video and share it (via download) for the duration of a session I don't think it's what you want to do in your use case.

NetGroup is one of the p2p features that will be available in FlashPlayer 10.1

LCCS does support p2p connections and p2p a/v streams and it will use the NetGroup feature for data sharing between peers (I think, I am not familiar with that part of the code, but in any case we will provide p2p data sharing when 10.1 will be available)

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Level 1

hi Raff,

Thank you for the reply! Sorry for getting back to this rather late. Let me rephrase my question here.

I wrote an application on Stratus, which supports P2P data sharing among peers. It relies on NetConnection and NetStream, whose send() function is especially helpful. To connect to Stratus you just need to call NetConnection.connect(Stratus_address_+DEVELOPER_KEY). NetGroup, when released, will be very helpful too.

I wonder if such an application would be portable to LCCS?

Thank you very much!

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Employee

We are adding p2p data sharing to LCCS, that uses the same primitives you use to connect to Stratus and then establish p2p connections to peers (and we'll be using NetGroups to group peers)

So, yes, you'll be able to write p2p applications for data messaging that use the LCCS data messaging model. But you will not be able to reuse your low-level code you wrote for Stratus, since we don't expose the NetConnection interface.


The nice thing of using LCCS vs. Stratus is that your application can leverage both client-server and p2p configuration depending on the number of user connected and network conditions. Or, you can start with client-server configuration and then switch to p2p if you find out that your typical use case is, for example, a few users mostly on the same local network. Or start with p2p and later reconfigure for client-server if your typical use case is a large number of users, or users that normally are on networks that don't allow or perform poorly in a p2p configuration.

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Level 1

Sorry to bother you with another question Raff, when you say "start with p2p and later reconfigure for client-server if your typical use case is a large number of users,...", do you mean you will switch to hub-and-spoke when the number of peers in one room are high? I am under the impression that P2P works better when there are more peers.

Thank you very much!

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Former Community Member

I have some questions regarding the free usage and the monthly limits.

In the Dev Portal I currently have 3 "Applications". My "default" application says "Free" under "Montlhy Limit" and the others have a dollar limit.

1. Does that mean that the $15 free I get each month only is usage on my "default" application ?

2. Which again means that I can not have an application running that have $15 free usage and after that usage is billed ?

3. The limit I have set does that get reset on the first of every month or on the day I get charged ?

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Former Community Member

Hi tflx,

1) Yes, but you can always assign another app to your FREE quota pool.

2) Correct.  The idea is to let you keep your development separate from a live application.  So, you can always point your application to the Default app or any other that you've specified as FREE during development.  And, when you are ready to push it live, just point it back to the one you've specified.

3) The limit resets on the day you get charged.

Thanks,

Fang

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Former Community Member

Okay - one more question then.

Looking at "Usage this cycle" is that then usage since the last charge or usage since the first of the month?

It should of course in my opinion be since last charge but I'm in doubt because when I open a Report for that application the begin date is the first of the month up till today.

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Former Community Member

(Sorry for the delay, I'm coming back to speed after a vacation)

You're right of course, the "cycle" refers to your billing cycle, which,

if you've paid the $5 upgrade fee, starts on the day you made that payment

(you're billed every month from that day). If it's a free account, we just

use calendar months.

Our reports could be smarter - you're able to change the range for the

report graphs, which default to calendar months. I'm making a note that we

should remember your billing date and use that for the graphs.

nigel

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Former Community Member

Thanks

Another thing you should probably look into:

I changed a Monthly Limit from $15 to $50. After I logged out and in again it said FREE.

After another logout and login it correctly said $50 though.

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Former Community Member

Two questions I really hope someone can answer. FYI I am building a simple 1-to-1 video/text chat, currently on Stratus, but sick of the downtime, etc..

1) When a communicating over a p2p connection, are we still charged for messages?


2) If I have 100 people randomly chatting with eachother, what percentage would you expect to fall back to hub-spoke?

Thank you!

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Former Community Member

Hi,

Currently we have p2p only for audio/video and not data messages.

a) If you are using p2p for audio/video, then you are not charged for that stream. You are charged only for the connection time.

b) Currently we don't have p2p for text chat. But in future when we provide that feature, you won't be charged for text chat for any number of users. However, for audio/video chat, it falls back to hub-spoke the moment its more than 3 people or someone doesn’t have player 10 or firewall.

Thanks

Hironmay Basu

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Level 4

Hironmay, correct me if I'm wrong here but in scenario a), doing a p2p video

call, you are still charged for "messaging" because you must still be

connected to the LCCS service. There are still control messages being

passed back and forth almost like a sideband channel between the two peer to

peer clients. You won't be charged for the stream but there is still a

smaller charge for the messaging in this case. That's my understanding of

how all this works anyway.

-Eric

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Former Community Member

This makes sense to me, though I don't see why messages couldnt be passed in the p2p stream as we do successfully with Stratus.

My concern is really the amount of users that require the fall back to hub-spoke. The difference in cost with an app serving tens of thousands of users could be tremendous.

Assuming we detect and force Flash Player 10.1+ use in our app, what % (very roughly) might we expect to have to fall back due to firewall issues?

By debugging ChatRoulette's code I noticed they've increased their FMS server cluster from 5 to 12 boxes. My guess is there is a pretty large % of fallback for whatever reason.

-jared

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Level 4

Yep welcome to my world, we worry about the same thing with our LCCS video

chat. Besides if you could pass messages over p2p, how could they charge

you for connect time? I forget how but you can force no hub and spoke if

you want.

Oh and btw, this might not apply to you but right now you can't do video and

audio chat with three people without getting forced into hub and spoke.

Something to do with the maximum number of p2p streams that are currently

allowed before fall back. One of the guys mentioned changing that in a

future release though.

I've been assuming (dangerous I know) that firewall/NAT fall back will

happen whenever someone is behind a symmetric NAT, a dual NAT or a very

restrictive firewall. So that would be users in some corporate environments

(certainly not our small startup office), and probably home users running

firewall programs on their PC that are set to be very restrictive. So hard

to come up with a percentage really, but I'd wager that most people who are

just behind typical home routers will be just fine.

-Eric

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Former Community Member

First up, for P2P audio/video chat, as long as you're just doing 3 people

or fewer in a room, and they all have permissive firewalls, you'll be fine.

We are adding P2P data, likely within the next 2 months (it's more

complicated for us, since we wanted to fit it properly within our existing

dev model). As Basu says, you won't be charged for P2P usage. I'm making a

note that one of the features we should add in is the ability to prevent a

user from connecting unless they can get RTMFP to work.

That said, in all cases, you'll still have some control messages sent hub

and spoke (for example, for setting up the peer connections), and you'll

still have connection time charges (RTMFP still requires a persistent

connection to the service, which eats a small portion of our capacity).

nigel

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Level 4

Nigel,

          Can you clarify this statement " First up, for P2P audio/video chat, as long as you're just doing 3 people or fewer in a room, and they all have permissive firewalls, you'll be fine."

In a previous thread where I asked about three man a/v chat I asked:

Is there a limit on the number of P2P streams allowed by the flash player?    I've got three way video chat working and there's a message in my debug log that says:  "The total stream limit for P2P streams have"   and then it cuts off.   I grepped the source and didn't find that warning/error message.

So I'm guessing it's about to tell me the number of streams have been reached?   Beyond the fact that 3 upstream video chats is probably all most connections can handle, is this a hard limit in the player or a soft limit based on available bandwidth?

Thanks for the help.

-Eric

To which Hironmay later responded:

Hi,

If you are doing both audio and video for all three , It won't work. However, if you are doing only video then all three can share video.

So, the logic says the number of streams of any user multiplied by number of other users (except him) should not be greater than 3. So, if I am sharing both audio and video and there are two more people, then it becomes 4, which makes it fall back to hub-spoke.

Hope this helps
Thanks
Hironmay Basu

To which you responed:

Yeah, in this case, for every user that's receiving your stream, you have
to stream separately to them. So if I'm videochatting with 3 folks, I'm
pushing 3 streams - it's a lot for most uplinks to handle (many have their
hands full with just 1).

What we could consider doing is adding an API to StreamManager, such that

you could declare the stream limit and override how much pushing you think

your users can handle.

nigel

So does this mean you  have removed this restriction or that there is a new API in StreamManager I need to look up and add to our code?

Not trying to be a d*ck just want to make sure I'm on top of things.

Thank You,

Eric

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Former Community Member

Hi Eric,

What we have here is a hard limit (3 streams per user, Basu does a good job

in explaining the math as you've quoted him), but it's in the SDK, not the

player. We based this on some empirical testing - we're not dynamically

measuring your bandwidth. I wondered aloud if it made sense to allow

developers to modify that limit, which I think I'm hearing the answer is

yes, we should.

hope that helps

nigel

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Level 1

Now with the wonderful April feature explosion, I just want to revisit the pricing a bit here. If I use P2P data messaging, will I be charged for $0.10 USD per 1K message pushed in?

Thank you very much!