FAQ - Analytics MAU Pricing Model Update

Unity Services
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A special note on the pricing change
After announcing the new pricing model for UGS Analytics in early June, 2023, we have been listening to feedback from our developer community.

The feedback has been consistent on 2 points:

  • The MAU-based nature of the pricing model does give needed transparency around costs, and helps developers better determine and predict their costs more easily.
  • The specific level of pricing in our tiered system was a significant concern for developers, for whom the cost would make our Analytics product inaccessible for many teams.

In light of this feedback, the pricing chart below has been updated to reflect the new, reduced, pricing tiers to help keep the service accessible for studios of all sizes. These changes will still take effect on August 1, 2023.

What is changing with UGS Analytics?
On August 1, 2023, Unity will change the pricing model of UGS Analytics. The current consumption pricing model based on events and query seconds will stop and customers will be charged on a model based on the number of Monthly Active Users (MAUs).

Why is Unity making this change?
Changing to MAU-based pricing allows Unity to provide a pricing model that will help customers better predict their costs as their game scales from an increased number of players. MAU is also a widely recognized industry standard for measuring user engagement that can be easier to understand compared to other models.

Is MAU-based pricing coming to other Unity products or services?
MAU-based pricing will be available for Leaderboards and for Analytics as of August 1, 2023. Unity is also working to update the pricing model for certain other Unity Gaming Services to a MAU-based pricing model where it believes such change will have a beneficial impact on Unity’s customers in simplifying the pricing model.

How does MAU-based pricing work for Analytics?
MAU stands for Monthly Active Users. It is a unit of measurement that counts the total number of unique user IDs that had at least one session within a given calendar month. This is measured by the unityInstallationID or any custom userID that is passed to the Analytics service, and is specific to the Analytics product and not impacted by other products in the UGS bundle.

The UGS Analytics product will offer a Free Tier up to a certain number of MAUs. Customers will be charged when the number of MAUs exceeds the Free Tier or certain Fair Usage limits.

What are the pricing tiers for UGS Analytics?
9047854--1263715--upload_2023-6-28_23-28-43.png
* Revised pricing as of 28th Jun 2023

What are Fair Usage Limits?
Fair Usage Limits are a set amount of usage capacity for a service beyond which a surcharge may be added to your bill. This is primarily to prevent abuse of Unity’s services by customers performing an excessive number of operations per MAU. Unity expects a very small number of edge cases to be impacted by these limits.

How do Fair Usage Limits work for Analytics under this pricing model?
Once you surpass the Free Tier, you will be subject to fair usage limits to ensure that Unity can continue to provide a reliable service for all customers. You will receive notifications as you approach your fair usage limits, allowing you to take action to prevent exceeding them.

The following limits apply:

  • 500 custom events per MAU

  • 0.05 seconds of SQL data explorer query time per MAU

If your organization exceeds the fair usage limits for the Analytics product, a surcharge will be applied for the excess usage. In the event that multiple fair usage limits are exceeded, the meter with the highest percentage over the limit will be considered for surcharging. The surcharge for excess usage will be reflected on your monthly bill, and these limits will reset at the beginning of each calendar month.

It’s important to note that fair usage is an average value and may fluctuate throughout the month as MAU cumulatively increases. Therefore, the source of truth for your usage and billing will be reflected in your bill at the end of each month. It’s also important to note that both valid and invalid events count towards the custom event limit.

If you exceed fair usage limits and haven’t provided payment details, you may be contacted by Unity to discuss reducing usage or accepting special terms.

How can I monitor my usage to understand whether I will be subject to a fair usage surcharge?
Within the Unity Dashboard, there will be multiple locations where you can keep track of your fair usage limits. These include the Service Usage tab on the main dashboard and the Analytics landing page.

Will the pricing update affect existing customers?
Yes, the updates to UGS Analytics will affect both new and existing Analytics customers from August 1, 2023.

I just upgraded from Legacy Analytics, does this pricing update affect me?
Data that is migrated from Legacy Analytics to the new UGS Analytics will not be counted towards the MAU billing.

However, any data received into UGS Analytics from the UGS Analytics SDK will be subject to billing. Once a customer installs the UGS Analytics SDK into their project and it begins ingesting data, it will be added towards the MAU model and be billable.

Additionally, if the SQL data explorer is used to query against data imported from Legacy Analytics, that will be counted towards the Fair Usage Limits.

When will the first billing period occur?
The first billing period for the new Analytics MAU pricing model will run from August 1, 2023 to August 31, 2023, and customers can expect to receive their first bill under the new pricing model in early September.

How can I estimate how much my first bill will be under the new MAU pricing model?
Your first bill under the new pricing model will be based on the sum of Monthly Active Users (MAU) across all projects and environments in your organization. If your MAU is below 50,000, you will be able to use the Analytics service free of charge. If your MAU exceeds 50,000, you will be charged at a different rate per tier exceeded. You can refer to the pricing table above to estimate your costs or submit a request to speak with our support team about your project.

Do I need to take any action to switch to the MAU pricing model?
No, you don’t need to take any action to switch to the MAU pricing model. Starting from August 1, 2023 you will automatically be subscribed to the new pricing model and will no longer be charged under the event and query seconds pricing model.

Will my usage be reset at the beginning of each month?
Yes. All usage, including MAU and fair usage limits, will be reset at the beginning of each calendar month. This means that you will have a fresh usage allowance to work with at the start of each billing cycle.

How will the MAU pricing model affect my existing contracts with Unity?
The new pricing model will be applied to all customers, regardless of any existing contracts or commitments. However, if you have a negotiated contract, we recommend reaching out to your partner at Unity to understand how the new pricing model will affect your billing.

Will the MAU pricing model affect my current integration with the Analytics service?
No, the new pricing model will not affect your current integration with the Analytics service. You can continue to use the service as you have been, with the added benefit of a more straightforward and predictable pricing structure.

Can I switch back to the old pricing model?
No, the old pricing model will no longer be available once the new MAU pricing model is implemented on August 1, 2023. We believe that the new model will provide a more flexible and cost-effective solution for customers.

Will the MAU pricing model affect the other UGS services I am using?
No, each UGS product has its own billing unit and is separate from each other. The Analytics MAU meter is specific to the Analytics service and will not impact the pricing of other UGS services. Your Analytics usage that exceeds the free tier will be visible as a line item on your bill.

How can I reduce the number of custom events being sent by my game?
You can reduce the number of custom events being sent by your game by following some best practices available in this article. It’s important to note that both valid and invalid events count towards the custom event limit.

How can I reduce the number of SQL query seconds I am consuming?
To reduce the amount of SQL query seconds you are consuming we recommend that you make sure your queries are optimized for efficiency, particularly when handling large datasets. You can also refer to our cookbook for guidance.

What should I do if I have general concerns or questions not covered in the documentation?
If you have general concerns or questions that are not addressed in the documentation, please contact our support team or reach out to your Unity client partner.

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The pricing tiers attachment is not loading correctly.

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Apologies for the inconvenience caused. The attachment should be available now.

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So for 2M MAU, it’s $7500. Compare that to GameAnalytics that costs $499 for the same MAU. What is your argument for that much higher price?

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This is exactly why we left deltaDNA. Our game attracted a lot of players in tier 3 countries that downloaded the game organically (we didn’t acquire them) but didn’t monetize well. We were being punished by this type of pricing model so had to leave.

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I don’t understand how this change is justified, if i understand this correctly our free game’s usage(not monitized ) of unity analytics (with 200k users) goes from entirely free to over $1000 / mo This is INSANE. This goes entirely against the stated reason for changing the pricing model of reducing the occurrence of surprise bills.

For this price i’m just going to build out my own internal analytics system. And you guys are going to loose any potential revenue that would have been gained.

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Thanks for the recommendation btw, i may just have to migrate over to their services if this goes though.

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This is incredibly expensive. To go from $0 to >$10k month for our game is impossible to understand. For me it reflects poorly on Unity to make a change like this so late in the transition to the new system which was already looking pretty pricey.

Also it is really not great to have this hidden away on the forums rather than on your pricing page. UGS Pricing

I was lucky to find this while trying to solve a problem I was having with migrating to the new system. So only a few hours were lost on moving to new analytics. We will be moving away from Unity for analytics and probably services in general. The judgement shown here was too poor to risk relying on UGS.

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While it is definitely easier to track expenses with the new usage model, i still have a lot of issues with the transition.

  • A two months notice is not enough time for a change of this magnitude.
    We are suddenly forced to reevaluate our analytics solution and make changes to production out of the blue.
    This is the kind of change I would expect to get notified with at least 6 months in advance.

  • The new pricing model is significantly different from the previous one:
    Previously, if a user only played the game for a short period they would have a minimal impact on the analytics cost. Now every user costs the same. Realistically, given the time, I would have to reconsider what data we are tracking when, and change our implementation.

  • My rough estimates shows a significant increase in our theoretical costs.
    This is probably caused by the fact that we were already on the edge of the free tier. Maybe the previous free-tier was incredibly generous, but still, this is very problematic.

  • How can I be sure that you won’t make another change in the future?
    It’s vital for the expenses to be consistent over the release window, so that I can properly calculate the cost in advance. I’d rather pay a little more for another service if I’m sure their pricing is locked in.

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Out of the box idea to minimalize the costs for this integration:
You could track the MAU on your own server and ping this to every player on startup before initializing analytics. If this amount is above x (say 50.000) you could choose to not initialize/enable analytics. In this way you can see the real MAU on your own server while still having pretty much data. The amount of data with 50.000 (or more, if you like) is already so much that you would probably still have reliable analytics.

Edit:
This should be the way to do this:

if (DAUMaxReached)
{
    s_ServiceStatus = InitializationStatus.Failed;
    return;
}

await UnityServices.InitializeAsync();
List<string> consentIdentifiers = await AnalyticsService.Instance.CheckForRequiredConsents();
s_ServiceStatus = InitializationStatus.Success;

Where s_ServiceStatus would be a custom enum that you should use to check if you want to fire analytic events or not.

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So there’s no way to automatically cap the usage at 50 000?

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Well, that is not an acceptable pricing model for free2play games, time to leave :confused:
@epicstorydennis said it all

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We did not migrate from Legacy Analytics because of the onerous amount of work imposed on us by the transition (manually entering definitions for all of our events). Instead we just stopped using it.

However, we still use UGS for Unity IAP, which causes basic analytics stats to show up. Will this cause us to be charged for Analytics, even though we don’t use it directly?

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Are you guys sure you posted the right numbers? I did some quick calculations and if I have around 408K MAU and sending the exact 500 events per MAU per month and using the exact 0.05 seconds of SQL processing per MAU per month I would be paying around $590 a month with the current pricing model whilst the new MAU pricing is going to cost around $2255… That’s a whopping 3.8x cost. If you divide the new pricing by 10 it would come to a much more reasonable $225.50 a month for the full usage, let’s say you divide the numbers by 5 to get closer to the cost of the original pricing model then it would be around $451 a month.

I’ve already switched to Firebase for my own game but still have the UGS Analytics library in my game simply because I haven’t removed it yet, definitely going to remove it before putting my game live now to avoid accidentally causing a lot higher cost than expected.

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Honestly this was my thought as well that someone forgot a 0 when typing out the pricing or something.

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From what I understand from the information on this link.
https://docs.unity3d.com/Packages/com.unity.purchasing@4.2/manual/UnityIAPInitializeUnityGamingServices.html
To use in-app purchases, that is, the “In App Purchasing” package without which it is impossible to implement in-app purchases, am I obliged to initialize UGS? Does this mean that if I implement in-app purchases, I must use analytics and pay for each user at the new prices in any case? Or can I not initialize UGS for the purchases to work?

Dear Unity Support, could you clarify this issue?

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Overpriced. I currently do not have ads in my game nor am I over the 50k limit, but back then where I had ~1900 MAU and had non-intrusive, rare interstitial ads and rewarded ads I earned like 13$ per month from ads - the pricing for that would be, ignoring the existance of the free tier, 11,40$

Since well, ad revenue doesn’t scale exponetially or something like that, it would probably be a similiar proportion at 50k MAU.

This is basically forcing developers to implement intrusive and annoying ads or IAPs if they plan to not lose >80% of their revenue.

Whilst sure, this data can not and will not be the same for everyone, it still feels way too expensive. Its definitely a lot more expensive than before. Reduce the pricing or at least make them brackets so you dont suddenly have to pay 300$ when you reach 50001 MAU. This change just makes UGS Analytics extremely unattractive to most people

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You don’t, the first 50K MAU are free, after that 50K if you go over by 1 you will only pay the $0.006 for that 1 MAU (it’s a tiered system, every tier has its own price and min/max amount, anything over its max will simply flow over to the next tier)

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I can’t answer this for sure, but in the game I’m working on now, I use In-App Purchasing and Unity Ads, but I don’t use the Analytics library at all, and my dashboard for Unity Analytics does not show any usage, so it looks like you can use IAP and Unity Ads without triggering Unity’s analytics at these costs.

Also, this quote from the main post also seems to indicate that this only applies to actual Analytics calls and not other UGS products: “This is measured by the unityInstallationID or any custom userID that is passed to the Analytics service, and is specific to the Analytics product and not impacted by other products in the UGS bundle.”

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