Foony Realtime meters one thing, messages. This page explains exactly what counts as a message, where to watch your usage, and what happens on the bill.
How messages are counted
A billed message is a message in or a message out. One publish to a channel with three subscribers counts four: one inbound, three delivered. That’s the same accounting whether the traffic arrives over an SDK, the REST API, or the Pusher compatibility layer.
Presence counts the same way. An enter, update, or leave is a message in, and each presence event delivered to a watching client is a message out. Reading a channel’s member list, on subscribe or over REST, counts one message out per member returned.
Two things keep the count lower than you might expect:
- A batch is one message. Publishing an array counts once inbound and once per subscriber outbound, not once per member. The SDK’s automatic batching does this for rapid-fire publishes without you asking, as described in Publish and subscribe.
- Idle channels and connections are free. Only messages meter. Connections and channels are capacity limits per plan, not billed units.
Watching usage
The project’s Usage & Billing tab charts messages over time with a by-app and a by-channel-prefix breakdown, at minute, hour, day, or month granularity. Each app’s overview also shows live connections, channels, and message throughput, per Monitoring.
Set a monthly budget on the project to get email alerts at 50%, 90%, and 100% of the amount. The budget alerts, it doesn’t cut service.
Plans and overage
Plans include a monthly message allotment, per the numbers on Limits and the pricing page:
- Free stops accepting new messages once the month’s allotment is used, until the month rolls over.
- Paid plans keep going. Usage above the allotment bills as overage, per million messages, added in arrears to the next renewal invoice.
Upgrades happen in the dashboard through Stripe checkout, and existing subscriptions are managed, invoices included, through the Stripe billing portal behind the Manage billing button. Plan changes take effect on the service within about 15 seconds.