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 include monthly entitlements for contexts, service connections, and Experimentation keys.

Contexts

Some customers are billed by contexts. LaunchDarkly only charges for contexts from your primary context kind.

Unless otherwise specified in your agreement with LaunchDarkly, the primary context kind is the context kind with the highest volume of monthly activity. LaunchDarkly calculates this as the context kind with the largest number of unique contexts that evaluate, initialize, or identify any flag from a client-side SDK over a given calendar month. By default, the primary context kind is set to user. Only the client-side activity of a primary context kind is factored into billing.

Your usage is based on the total number of unique contexts of the primary context kind across your entire account, regardless of anonymity or whether the context is currently visible on the Contexts list.

Uniqueness is defined as unique context keys. If you change an existing context's key, LaunchDarkly considers the new context unique and counts it as an additional context instance of the given context kind. Custom attributes do not affect uniqueness. Each unique context of a particular context kind contributes the cardinality of that context kind. It does not matter whether the context is part of a multi-context.

If you subscribe to a LaunchDarkly plan, you commit to a certain number of unique contexts 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 tab.

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 tab.

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 tab.

For some older 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.

Monthly active users (MAU)

Some customers on older plans are billed by client-side monthly active users (MAU). LaunchDarkly calculates client-side MAU as unique user context keys that evaluate, initialize, or identify any flag from a client-side SDK over a calendar month. The amount of these user contexts is designated per account.

Your usage is based on the total number of unique client-side user contexts across your entire account, regardless of anonymity or whether the user context is currently visible on the Contexts list. Uniqueness is defined as unique user context keys. Each unique user context counts as one client-side MAU. If you change an existing user context's key, LaunchDarkly considers the new user context unique and counts it as an additional client-side MAU. Custom attributes do not affect client-side MAU uniqueness.

About 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.