Calculating billing

Overview

This topic explains how LaunchDarkly calculates billing for your account.

LaunchDarkly calculates your billing based on different aspects of your system usage. Depending on your billing model, you may be billed for more than one of the account usage metrics displayed on the Usage page.

For example, Foundation, Enterprise, and Guardian plans can include monthly entitlements for client-side MAU, service connections, and Experimentation keys. LaunchDarkly will bill you at the beginning of each month for any usage in excess of these entitlements from the prior month. Throughout each month, LaunchDarkly sends an email notification to your account owner and your account's billing contact when your overage balance exceeds various dollar amounts.

Client-side monthly active users (MAU)

MAU is the number of unique monthly active users who encounter LaunchDarkly client-side SDKs. For most customers, we use client-side monthly active users (MAU) to help determine your bill every month.

Your usage is based on the total number of unique client-side MAU across your entire account. Uniqueness is defined by unique context keys. If you change an existing context's key, LaunchDarkly considers the new context unique and counts it as an additional MAU. Custom attributes do not affect uniqueness.

If you subscribe to a LaunchDarkly plan, you commit to a certain number of unique MAU each month.

Client-side MAU for context kinds other than user

For most LaunchDarkly customers, MAU is the number of client-side monthly active users.

The majority of LaunchDarkly customers use the user context kind the most. However, if your greatest-used context kind is something other than user, then your MAU is calculated based on that kind. For example:

• If you use 2,000,000 users and 500,000 devices, your MAU will be 2,000,000, based on user.
• If you use 2,000,000 users and 4,000,000 devices, your MAU will be 4,000,000, based on device.

Client-side MAU limits

The LaunchDarkly plan you subscribe to may include a client-side MAU limit. We understand that a company's customer base can grow unexpectedly over time. We never stop or throttle service if you exceed your client-side MAU limit. All contexts will continue to receive feature flags correctly, regardless of the amount of your client-side MAU.

Context instances live on the Contexts list for 30 days from their last evaluation, or until the environment reaches 3,000,000 context instances. To learn more, read Context storage.

If you have configured LaunchDarkly to use anonymous contexts, that can impact your client-side MAU as well. To learn more, read Manage anonymous contexts.

To learn more about your client-side usage billing model, contact your LaunchDarkly representative.

Service connections

Some customers are billed by service connections. A service connection is one instance of one server-side SDK connected to one LaunchDarkly environment for a time period measured in minutes. To learn more, read Service connections.

If you subscribe to a LaunchDarkly plan, you commit to a certain number of service connections each month. LaunchDarkly will also bill you at the beginning of each month for any usage in excess of these prepaid entitlements from the prior month. You can change your monthly entitlements from the Billing page. To learn more, read The Billing page.

Experimentation keys

Some customers are billed by Experimentation keys.

Experimentation keys include the total number of unique context keys, from server-side, client-side, and edge SDKs, included in each experiment:

• if the same context key is in one experiment multiple times, LaunchDarkly counts it as one Experimentation key
• if the same context key is in two different experiments, LaunchDarkly counts it as two Experimentation keys

Your total usage of Experimentation keys measures how many contexts you are targeting in your experiments.

If you subscribe to a LaunchDarkly plan, you commit to a certain number of Experimentation keys each month. LaunchDarkly will also bill you at the beginning of each month for any usage in excess of these prepaid entitlements from the prior month. You can change your monthly entitlements from the Billing page. To learn more, read The Billing page.

For some annual billing plans, you commit to a certain number of Experimentation keys each month. If you consistently go over your plan limits, averaged over a quarter, we will "true forward" your contract based on your actual average use. To learn more about your Experimentation billing plan, contact your LaunchDarkly representative.