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Pricing and Billing

EMQX Platform offers a variety of flexible product plans and pricing options to support the deployment of fully managed MQTT services exclusively for you on the leading cloud providers, so you can easily scale up or down as your needs change, without any hidden costs or fees.

Serverless Plan

The EMQX Serverless Plan charges are based on the actual usage of your deployment, which includes the number of session minutes and the volume of traffic generated by messages. At the start of each month, you receive a free quota that covers a certain amount of session minutes and traffic. This free quota is applied first, and charges will only be incurred once it has been fully utilized.

Billing Unit

Session fee: Calculated based on session minutes, where 1 session minute represents 1 client connection to the deployment for a duration of 1 minute. Any connection lasting less than 1 minute will be rounded up and billed as a full minute.

Traffic fee: Traffic (including free traffic) refers to all public network traffic that flows in and out of your deployment.

Data integration: The total number of rule action execution times.

Term Explanations

Number of Client Sessions: The total number of clients currently connected to the deployment, including both online clients and offline clients with persistent sessions enabled.

Persistent Session: A session that remains active and stores offline messages when the client disconnects, until the session times out and is logged out.

Pricing and Free Quota

Billing UnitFree QuotaPrice
Session fee1 million session minutes / month$2.00 per million session minutes
Traffic fee1 GB / month$0.15 per GB
Data integration1 million rule action executions / month$0.25 per million rule action executions

Billing Method

The billing method is calculated according to the following formulas:

Session fee:

Session Fee=Number of client sessions×session duration (minutes, rounded up)÷1,000,000×2

Traffic fee:

Traffic Fee=Inbound and outbound traffic (bytes)÷(1024×1024×1024)×0.15

Data integration fee:

Data Integration Fee=Number of rule action executions÷1,000,000×0.25

Billing Example for Session Fee

In a 24-hour billing period, assume a user has the following client connections:

  • 120 client connections for 10 hours
  • 20 client connections for 10 hours
  • 0 client connections for 4 hours

The total session minutes would be calculated as follows:

120×60×10+20×60×10+0=84,000 session minutes

If this usage falls within the free quota, the session fee will be $0. However, if the free quota has been exhausted, the session fee will be calculated as:

84,000÷1,000,000×2=0.168

This amount is rounded up to $0.17.

Billing is calculated based on the accumulated fees over the previous 24 hours, with collections occurring daily at 00:00. For more details, visit the Billing Overview page.

Spend Limit

The Spend Limit feature allows you to control the maximum amount your Serverless deployment can spend each month. You will receive a notification when your spending reaches this limit. The Spend Limit can be set during deployment creation and adjusted later as needed.

The spending limit can be set as an integer from 0 to 10,000:

  • 0: If set to 0, the deployment will only utilize the free quota, which includes 1 million session minutes, 1 GB of traffic, and 1 million rule action executions per month. Once the free quota is exhausted, the deployment will be stopped.
  • 1 to 10,000: If set to an integer between 1 and 10,000, you must choose an action to be taken when the monthly spending limit is reached. Options include stopping the deployment or continuing service with additional charges. However, if there is an overdue bill, the deployment will be stopped regardless of the previously selected action.

Dedicated Plan

The EMQX Dedicated Plan is billed based on the selected tier and the amount of message transmission network traffic. There are no limits on the number of messages, API calls, or data integration usage. You can choose the plan that best suits your business needs, with the assurance that costs will remain transparent and manageable as your business grows.

Billing Unit

Base Fee: The base fee for your instance is determined by the hourly unit price associated with the selected product plan and instance tier (which specifies the maximum number of client connections and message transactions per second, or TPS) at the time of deployment. This fee is solely dependent on the duration of usage and is not influenced by fluctuations in usage, such as the number of client connections or message TPS.

Traffic Fee: Each instance tier includes a monthly allowance of free traffic. This free traffic is only valid for the current month and any unused portion will be automatically cleared at the month's end. If device communication exceeds the allocated free traffic, the excess will be billed as traffic fees.

Term Explanations

Number of Client Connections: The total number of clients currently connected to the deployment, including both online clients and offline clients with persistent sessions enabled.

Persistent Session: A session that remains active and stores offline messages when the client disconnects until the session times out and is logged out.

Traffic: Traffic (including free traffic) refers to all public network traffic flowing out of the deployment.

  • Traffic through VPC peering connections or private network connections is not included in the traffic calculation.

  • The traffic of messages received by the deployment (e.g., messages sent to the deployment by clients) is not included in the traffic calculation.

  • If a NAT gateway is enabled, the traffic flowing out of the deployment is considered public network traffic and will be included in the traffic calculation.

Billing Method

There are two billing methods: hourly billing and annual prepaid. For hourly billing, charges are calculated every hour based on usage for the previous hour, and charged from your account balance. For annual prepaid, you can choose to be charged from a credit card or available credits.

Tier-Based Fee for Hourly Billing Method

The hourly charges are then accumulated into monthly charges, which you can view details on the Billing Overview page.

PlanTierBase FeeFree TrafficPaid Traffic (Excess part)
Dedicated1,000 Sessions / 1,000 TPS$0.36 / hour 100 GB / month$0.15 / GB
2,000 Sessions / 2,000 TPS$0.50 / hour
5,000 Sessions / 10,000 TPS$0.99 / hour
10,000 Sessions / 20,000 TPS$1.49 / hour
>10,000 SessionsContact Us
::: tip Prices may vary depending on the public cloud platform selected and the deployment region. The actual price is based on the price displayed on the deployment page. :::

Annual Prepaid Method

When you choose the annual prepaid option, you will receive a 15% discount on the total fee. The estimated total cost, reflecting this discount, will be displayed in the Summary section during the deployment creation process.

Pricing of Suspended Deployment

Dedicated deployment in hourly billing will incur data retention fees at the following rates when suspended: $0.06 / hour.

Premium Plan

The Premium Plan provides a comprehensive solution for enterprises with advanced requirements. It offers dedicated resources and enhanced features, tailored to meet complex needs. This plan combines the reliability of a fixed annual subscription with the flexibility of usage-based pricing, ensuring scalability to suit your business growth.

Billing Unit

Base Fee: An annual subscription fee based on your allocated resources, guaranteeing dedicated capacity throughout the year.

Usage Fee: Variable charges based on data traffic, including:

  • Ingress Traffic: $0.05 per GB
  • Egress Traffic: $0.10 per GB

Billing Method

Annual Subscription: The Premium Plan operates on an annual billing cycle, with the base fee covering your dedicated resource allocation for the entire year.

Traffic-Based Charges: Monthly usage fees are calculated based on your ingress and egress data traffic, providing a clear and predictable cost structure.

For more information and to customize your Premium Plan, please contact our Sales team.

BYOC Plan

EMQX BYOC will deploy the EMQX service in your cloud platform account, and the associated costs include cloud platform resource fees and EMQX BYOC license fees.

Cost Components

ItemDescription
Cloud Platform ResourcesWhen EMQX BYOC is deployed and running, it utilizes virtual machines, networks, and other resources under your cloud platform account. You will be billed by the cloud platform provider for the usage of these resources.
EMQX BYOC LicenseTo use the EMQX BYOC service, you need to subscribe and obtain an official EMQX BYOC license from EMQ. For details on license pricing, please contact us.

Quotas and Limits

In addition to understanding the billing for product deployments, it is important to be fully aware of the quotas and limits associated with each deployment to avoid exceeding these limits. This will help ensure the stability of your deployment and the smooth operation of your business. For more details, see Quotas and Limits.