For the models that matter: Introducing Hasura DDN’s model-based pricing

Today, we’re thrilled to launch the beta version of Hasura Data Delivery Network (DDN) and unveil a disruptive pricing structure alongside it. Our new active model-based pricing upends the traditional usage-based pricing paradigm by aligning your costs with the value you receive from your API platform.

Our pricing model is based on a simple principle: If an API is a bridge that connects data sources to services, the value of the bridge is the connectivity it provides. We charge for constructing the bridge, not the toll for using it.

With this new pricing model, you will only be billed for active models, i.e. models that experience more than a certain threshold of requests. We will not charge for inactive or idle models that are used in an API, but do not get many hits. We define an active model as any model with >= 1000 hits per month.

In this blog, we’ll explore the benefits of our new pricing to members of the Hasura Community. For a detailed breakdown, read more here.

Because for the first time, customers have a pricing model that is entirely predictable based on the feature complexity they are adding to their applications.

Traditionally, when cost is purely usage-based, it can be volatile, leaving customers with unforeseen bills they weren’t prepared for. So Hasura’s new pricing model is totally unprecedented – understanding the resource endowment and usage of an application or feature now transparently informs the infrastructure cost of their API data layer. This also gives architects the power to build optimal infrastructure without worrying about inactive models contributing to expenses.

The benefits of this approach are multifold:

1. You pay only for the value you receive from Hasura DDN.
2. Your costs are entirely predictable based on your application’s resource demands.
3. Active model-based pricing can reduce your overall bill significantly!

Usage-based costs are high as your application gains popularity and attracts users, regardless of whether your application complexity is increasing or how many models you’re actually benefiting from.

Contrast this with the Hasura approach: Your Hasura cost only depends on the number of entities in your system, irrespective of the load your application receives.

If you’re using Hasura v2 Cloud, we suggest moving to Hasura DDN (our v3 product) whenever you’re ready.

Hasura DDN will be much more feature-rich and performant, and the pricing structure is far simpler. Pricing based on your total number of models has caused a disconnect between the costs incurred and the value received. Modern data workloads need a new pricing model.

At Hasura, we understand this pain point deeply, especially during economic uncertainty. Our new pricing model directly reflects our customers’ desire and advocacy for greater precision in pricing metrics. With active model-based pricing, we have committed to giving our customers better cost-to-value.

Here’s an overview of our pricing tiers:

Free
Our Free tier is meant for developers, startups, and small projects looking to experience the power of Hasura – especially perfect for indie orgs. The Free tier contains Hasura’s core features and allows a single developer to set up unlimited models at unlimited scale.

Base (coming soon)
At $5/ active model/ month, the Base plan is perfect for a solo team building a business-critical supergraph. This plan gives access to unlimited developers and 30 days of observability metrics and traces.

Advanced (coming soon)
At $30/ active model/ month, this plan is DDN Base plus much more! Perfect for organizations with multiple teams collaborating on a supergraph, our Advanced plan includes federated supergraph development and collaboration features so that teams can work together without friction. Most notably, it includes federated collaboration and CI/CD capabilities across multiple repos.

Private DDN
At $1000/ availability zone/ month, Private DDN is an ideal option for businesses with sensitive data workloads. Opting into Private DDN (on top of the Base or Advanced plans) enables users to either self-host the data plane or host the data plane on a fully isolated and dedicated VPC in Hasura Cloud. Private DDN offers enhanced data security and meets regulatory compliances including HIPAA.

Our new active model-based pricing represents a paradigm shift, ensuring your costs align directly with the value you receive from Hasura. By only charging for active models, you get pricing transparency to predict expenses accurately and optimize resource usage.

Whether you’re a startup, SMB, or enterprise, our new pricing tiers for Hasura DDN have something for everyone. And unlike usage-based pricing models, you can solve your organization’s data access issues without being penalized for your sure success.

1. What is a model?
For billing purposes, a model is either a logical grouping of data (model) or any piece of business logic (command) written and tracked in Hasura DDN. A model can be created from a database table, view, microservice, APIs, etc. If you are connecting to a REST API as a data source, then the output of the API is exposed as a model in Hasura DDN. An active model, the basis for our pricing, is defined as a model receiving >=1000 hits /month.

2. What is an availability zone (AZ)?
An AZ consists of one or more discrete data centers, each with redundant power, networking, and connectivity, and housed in separate facilities. Hasura strongly recommends that customers host their data plane on at least two AZs. This way, if one AZ fails due to natural calamity, power outage, etc., your application remains available. It may be noteworthy that GCP uses a slightly different naming convention and refers to availability zones as “zones” within “regions.”

You can get all Hasura DDN pricing details here. And for a full breakdown of Hasura DDN features in beta, read the announcement blog.