Deprecated Pricing System

From 1 April 2024, the new pricing system with the pay-as-you-go and subscription pricing models has become applicable for all Catalyst users. This section contains details of the now deprecated pricing system.

Key Features of the Deprecated Pricing Model

Free and Paid Tiers

• Catalyst offered the development environment as a free tier and the production environment as a paid tier. This allowed you to work in the development environment in all Catalyst applications, make API calls, and use most Catalyst features and components without setting up your payment method.

• The deprecated pricing system only billed you if you used the production environment. After deploying your Catalyst application to production, you would be priced for the API calls that were made to the components of your live Catalyst application.

Payment Units

• The two units of payment followed in the deprecated pricing method were Amount and Credits. Amount referred to the money in USD that you paid after a bill was generated. Credits referred to the value points that each Catalyst operation was charged with.

• Each time you used a Catalyst resource, the operation consumed a certain number of credits. Based on the total number of credits used, your bill amount was calculated.

Pricing Plans

• Catalyst offered two pricing plans in the deprecated model:

  • Light User
  • Heavy User

• These pricing plans were project-specific. That is, the pricing plan of one project could be ‘Heavy User’ and another project could be ‘Light User’ for the same user account.

• Based on your usage of Catalyst components and services in a particular project, Catalyst’s cost optimization software automatically analyzed and assigned the project to a pricing plan. The software always ensured that you were assigned to the most cost-optimized solution.

• The differences in both the pricing plans lay in the fixed fee and usage fee.

Pricing Calculations

• The operations you performed in your Catalyst application for a component were called component calls. For example, inserting, updating, deleting rows in a table in the Data Store using the APIs, or putting and getting key values in a cache. These operations were priced in terms of credits, and the final amount was calculated based on the credits consumed.

  For example, 1 Data Store Insert operation used to cost 2 credits. Therefore, if you performed 1000 Data Store insert operations, you would use 2000 credits.

• Each operation type in a Catalyst component used to cost a different amount of credits. Additionally, some components charged for storage that exceeded the free limits. They were priced in terms of credits as well.

• The overall bill amount was calculated based on the total number of credits consumed in your Catalyst account in all your projects, the operational or storage cost of each operation in a component, and the pricing plan of each project.

The pricing system discussed in this page is now deprecated, and the new pricing system enables you to choose between a pay-as-you-go pricing model or a subscription model. You can refer to their individual help pages to learn about the updated methods of calculating billing in both models, as well as the Free Tier help page for the free tier usage allowance available in both models.