Just over a month and half back, Windows Azure team released the Mobile Services. In addition to announcing paid services, they severely restricted the Free tier to the extent that it was not usable. The initial statement I got from them was that Free tier was meant for Testing. So what happened next ? I got it all up in my head and started a user voice. I talked to as many Windows Phone and Windows 8 developers as I could to tell them about it and to ask for their votes.
While I was vote gathering, I was also talking to Azure team and we discussed some stats on what is acceptable for free tier. We discussed the fact that 100 devices a month wasn’t really well thought-out idea and that it needed change. They agreed to increase the number and took on my suggestion of a daily device count as opposed to monthly device count.
The reasoning behind this is simple. If a user downloads your app, plays with it for 5 minutes but never ever uses your app, the user would have impacted the limited device count for whole month. With a daily limit, the new installs only impact for 24 hours not 30 days.
Last night Dinesh Kulkarni a Program Manager at WAMS acknowledged the user voice, closed it and updated the WAMS pricing document to reflect the changes that were in plan for good part of last month.
So what do we get now ?
Instead of 100 unique devices a month, we get 500 unique devices per day.
It is also worth noting Free tier isn’t covered by SLA and that its not monitored. Azure team will fix any issues on the Free tier (when identified) however Free tier services aren’t actively monitored – unlike the Standard and Premium tier that feature active monitoring to meet the SLA.
Additionally the 500 devices a day for Free tier are applicable across all your mobile services – not one. If you have 1 WAMS, you get 500 devices a day, if you have 10, you still only get 500 a day between all 10 services.
And finally what happens when your service registers 500 devices and additional devices keep coming ?
Well the service will stop servicing requests (not sure whether its for additional devices or across all) and will become available after 24hour device count reset.
The service would otherwise be untouched.
I think this is a satisfactory conditions imposed on Free tier. WAMS team would like to be cost neutral and for popular high device count / high volume app, they would like you to use paid SLA driven tiers.
I’d like to thank the Windows Azure Mobile Services team Josh Twist, Kirill Gavrylyuk and Dinesh Kulkarni for being open to the suggestion and of course all the Windows Phone and Windows 8 developers who took time to vote on the user voice. Without the developers, my whinging would have gone unheard. Thank you
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