Is firebase cost-effective? — A deeper look into firebase plans
We are living in a digitally smart world. Digital accessibility has become a need for every business. More and more businesses are turning towards an online presence. Almost everything has a mobile application or a website that gives it more exposure. Google Firebase was built to provide the developers with the tools that help them build quality apps, increase the traffic on those apps, and have good returns on their investment.
Before diving into the pricing plan of Firebase, let’s first see what it is.
What is Google Firebase?
Google Firebase is a mobile and web app development platform that was developed by Firebase Inc but was then acquired by Google in 2014. This platform was designed to help developers overcome challenges that demanded extra effort as well as their time. All the tools that Firebase provides work together to provide one smart solution. Google Firebase provides a plethora of services that range from creating APIs for managing the infrastructure.
Firebase provides 19 tools to the users that are being utilized in more than 1.5 million apps today that include Shazam with 120m users every month.
Firebase provides its services in 4 main areas:
- Analytics
- Development
- Stability
- Growth
Google Firebase covers every important aspect of app development.
Firebase Price Plans
Firebase provides different price plans for different business needs.
- Spark Plan (free)
- Blaze Plan (Pay as you go)
Google Firebase provides a generous plan for many in the spark plan. The plan provides limited services for free. To extend the services, blaze plan is introduced. You can increase your usage without any limitation but for a price. If you have switched to blaze plan but your usage is under the limit of spark plan, you don’t have to pay for it. The price for Blaze plan scales with your usage. You will be billed separately for every blaze plan feature that you utilize. This means you’re only paying for what you’re using. Let’s see these plans in more detail.
Spark
Spark is a free plan for users and provides generous limits for starting up. Spark plan provides free features that include free authentication, crash reports, and analytics. These features are provided with an unlimited amount of usage. The paid features for Google Firebase that are included in the blaze plan have a free tier in the spark plan. This covers a large part of app development needs hence making firebase beneficial even when not paying for anything.
Spark features have also widened as compared to the initial release of the plan. To find out what features Spark provides, visit the link below:
https://firebase.google.com/pricing
Blaze
The Blaze plan is an extension to Spark. Parts that are not covered using the Spark plan, Blaze plan covers it all. It is a pay-as-you-go plan meaning the tools that you use as you go with your development, your bill keeps adding it up till the end of the month. You can also track your usage during the month. The usage limit of this plan is different than that of the Spark plan. Your pricing scales with your usage only.
Blaze plan is not subscribed by paying for every feature that it provides. Switching to Blaze plan and still staying in the limits of free usage will not charge you at all. This means you’re only billed when you exceed that limit and only charged for the exceeded usage.
Spark vs Blaze
Spark plan and Blaze plan provide features and pricing that you can find on Firebase website but how can you know which plan will suit you more? We have drawn a comparison between the price plans provided by Google Firebase through some of the most useful tools.
- Authentication (phone and others)
Google Firebase provides the option of authenticating the user to your application. It provides authentication through mobile phones, email passwords, and other popular federated identity providers like Google, Facebook, and Twitter. Let’s compare the pricing for authentication services that both plans offer.
The comparison shows that phone authentications for 10,000 users every month is free and can be availed using spark plan but if the number of authentications rises from the limit, Blaze plan is required. Blaze plans in the US, Canada and India costs $0.01 for every authentication but for other countries, it’s $0.06 per verification.
The authentication provided using other platforms like Google, Facebook and Twitter is completely free for both of the plans.
- Cloud functions
With the cloud functions provided by Google Firebase, you don’t have to keep managing servers. The backend code runs and responds to any event that occurs using firebase features. Your code (Javascript or Typescript) gets stored in Google cloud and runs in a managed environment. You don’t have to manage your own servers. It allows you to write code that invokes any firebase functionality. These functions are invoked using HTTP requests, background functions, database triggers, and API calls.
For the Spark plan, inbound services are free but are limited to a specific number per month as we can see in the table. Inbound services within Blaze plan are free for the first 2 million invocations, 400kGB-sec for memory allocation, and 200kCPU-sec CPU allocation for computation. For outbound marketing, 5GB of internet egress traffic is for free. The table above shows the prices for more resource allocations.
- Cloud Firestore
Cloud firestore is used to keep your data synced across apps. It is a flexible, scalable, NoSQL database that can help you store, sync, and query data for your apps at a global level.
Let’s have a comparison between the plans that Google Firebase provides for Cloud Firestore
The table shows the limitations implemented by Spark plan. Blaze plan gives the freedom of 600k reads and deletes and 1.5m document writes but as the resources increase, it charges according to the table above. The data stored in Cloud Firestore is free for spark plan but that freedom is limited to 1GiB. In case more space is required, you’d need to switch to Blaze plan where you can buy more space at the rate of $0.18 per GiB.
- Real-Time Database
Just like Cloud Firestore, Real-Time Database is a NoSQL database that saves your data and makes it available offline. Your data persists in a disk and remains responsive even without internet connectivity. The data is directly accessed from client-side code and any changes that were made when offline get synced with the continuance of the connection. To acquire the service, Google Firebase offers the following price plans.
Spark plan supports only one database per project and 100 connections for that database. For more connections or multiple databases, you need to switch to Blaze that provides 200k connections for every database that it offers for a single project. Spark plan can store up to 1GB data and allows 10GB of downloading. For more storage and downloading, the blaze plan offers the price of $5 and $1 respectively for every GB required.
- Storage
You can use Google Firebase SDKs to store your images, videos, audio or any user-generated content in Cloud Storage. It provides Google security to the data stored. Cloud storage operations are robust, provide strong security, and high scalability.
Google Firebase offers these pricing plans for the Google Firebase services:
- Hosting
Firebase Hosting is used to deploy your website or application directly to Global CDN. The deployment of web apps and serving static or dynamic content to a global CDN is possible with a single command. From your CSS to HTML files. Firebase Hosting plans’ comparison looks like this:
You can add custom domains and can also keep multiple sites at one place using Google Firebase and that too for free.
The first 10GB for data storing and transferring is free with firebase hosting but is charged after these free resources are consumed according to the table above.
- Analytics
Analytics are used to get an insight into the user engagement on your website or app. This feature is provided for free on either plan offered by Google Firebase. It is, however, limited to 500 events that you need the reporting for. This can help you make informed decisions to optimize your performance.
- In-app messaging
This feature enables you to interact with the user through targeted contextual messages. The feature encourages users to benefit from the key features of the app. The feature is provided for free by Google Firebase.
- Firebase Cloud Messaging
Firebase provides a cross-platform messaging service using which you can inform the client about any recent updates. Firebase provides this tool to send push notifications to the user who requires them only. This service allows the sending of messages to a single user or multiple users as required. It sends acknowledgments back to your server.
Google Firebase has developed these plans to make sure that users don’t pay extra for the features and tools that they aren’t using.
How does bill calculator work?
If you haven’t yet understood how Google Firebase calculates the bill, take a look at this example where a user is building an app for movie ticket booking.
The app has 50,000 users, each day around 5000 users come to the app and book tickets.
There are 10,000 movies on the app. Each movie has an image banner that is 20 kb. All the images are stored in the storage and the app uses multi databases to keep the records of different genre movies and the user’s record. This means the movies that are stored in the storage take up to 200MBs of space.
The database is read whenever the user logins the system and when he opens the list of movies. Database is also read when a user clicks on a movie. On average 5 movies before making a choice, that makes it 5 database reads per session. In total, each user uses 7 database reads when choosing a movie to watch.
Every time a user books a film 2 document writes happen.
In order to book a ticket, two firebase cloud functions are called. Which means 5k people call 10k functions every day.
App uses google, Facebook, and apple authentication and also uses analytics to keep a record of the statistics. App also sends push notifications to the chosen users every week about the latest movies.
The table below shows how the bill for this app will be generated.
The table shows that the user would need to switch to blaze plan and will have to pay $0.426 at the end of each month. He doesn’t have to pay for other features provided by the plan that are either used under the free quota or are not used at all.
Still not sure how Google Firebase pricing works? Contact our consultants at Walturn LLC to gather more insight into the plan.
About Walturn LLC
Walturn LLC is a boutique Product and Technology consulting agency based in New York, US. The company was founded by a group of passionate technologists, business experts, and product managers from New York University. Although we have worked with some big names in the industry, our main focus has been on young startups with strong business potentials to help them build powerful platforms that can act as their backbone for business growth. The products that we have built are being used in places like Google, Museum of Art and History NY, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Expo2020 Dubai, NYU Dentistry, Harvard University, University of Colorado, etc. We have built a very strong team of talented and ambitious consultants and engineers who enjoy taking up challenges and building the best quality products. At Walturn, we are a very diverse team with regards to nationalities and expertise and we bring the ideas and experiences that come with it to our clients to build the next-generation technologies.
