Pricing Strategy & Beta Program

Beta Program

During the Ackal Beta Program, you will not be charged for your use of Ackal.

The Ackal Beta Program is expected to run for 3 months until at least the end of April 2023.

After the Ackal Beta Program concludes, if you wish to continue using Ackal, you will need to pay for subscription(s).

The Ackal Beta Program is being run for 3 main reasons, to:

  1. Determine whether it meets its customers' needs
  2. Ensure that it is functionally correct
  3. Calculate its running costs

During the Ackal Beta Program some requirements and limitations will be in place that are not expected to affect Ackal General Availability (GA). These include:

  • The limit on health check minutes (see below)
  • Ackal will be deleted and redeployed every day and unavailable during this time.
  • You may need to recreate your health checks every day.
  • Testing the underlying cloud platform will expose issues that may require disabling access to Ackal

A key benefit of Ackal is that you're able to monitor health checks by scraping them with Prometheus. The gaps in availability during the Ackal Beta Program will result in gaps in your metric data.

If you are unwilling to accommodate these requirements and limitations, please do not participate in the Ackal Beta Program but await Ackal General Availability (early 2023).

Pricing Strategy

A fundamental unit of Ackal is health check minutes.

As a customer of Ackal, when you create health checks, you accrue health check minutes. The cost of running Ackal is, in large part, determined by the number of health check minutes being run by customers.

For this reason, your cost of using Ackal is calculated from the number of health check minutes you consume.

A simple solution to pricing would be to charge customers based on their monthly aggregate health check minutes at some fixed cost for a health check minute.

We believe that this variability is less interesting to our customers than a monthly fixed price subscription fee. For this reason we plan to swap the variable aggreagate health check fee for fixed-price monthly subscriptions that will limit the number of health check minutes that you can incur.

Examples

One Health Check

Endpoint Period Location(s) Service(s)
server-01:443 120s London ...
NOTE Conventionally, people tend to configure health checks in seconds (e.g. 120s) but, to calculate Ackal health check minutes, it may be easier to think in minutes. ackalctl supports any common duration type when specifying the period e.g. --period=120s or --period=2m

For this, single location health check running every 2 minutes, 60/2=30 checks will run every hour, 24*30=720 every day and 30*720=21,600 every month.

One Health Check from 2 locations

Endpoint Period Location(s) Service(s)
server-01:443 120s London,Singapore ...

For this health check running from 2 locations every 2 minutes, 2*(60/2)=60 checks will run every hour, 24*60=1,440 every day and 30*1,440=43,200 every month.

Two Health Checks each from 2 locations

Endpoint Period Location(s) Service(s)
server-01:443 300s London,Singapore ...
server-02:443 300s Los Angeles,Tokyo ...

For these 2 health check each running from 2 locations and running every 5 minutes, 2*2*(60/5)=48 checks will run every hour, 24*48=1,152 every day and 30*1,152=34,560 every month.

Many Health Checks each from 6 locations

Endpoint Period Location(s) Service(s)
server-01:443 1m Los Angeles,New York, London, Frankfurt, Singapore, Tokyo ...
server-02:443 2m Los Angeles,New York, London, Frankfurt, Singapore, Tokyo ...
server-03:443 3m Los Angeles,New York, London, Frankfurt, Singapore, Tokyo ...
server-04:443 4m Los Angeles,New York, London, Frankfurt, Singapore, Tokyo ...
server-05:443 5m Los Angeles,New York, London, Frankfurt, Singapore, Tokyo ...
server-06:443 6m Los Angeles,New York, London, Frankfurt, Singapore, Tokyo ...
server-07:443 8m Los Angeles,New York, London, Frankfurt, Singapore, Tokyo ...
server-08:443 10m Los Angeles,New York, London, Frankfurt, Singapore, Tokyo ...
server-09:443 15m Los Angeles,New York, London, Frankfurt, Singapore, Tokyo ...
server-0a:443 30m Los Angeles,New York, London, Frankfurt, Singapore, Tokyo ...

For these 10 health checks each running from 6 locations, 6*60*(1/1+1/2+1/3+1/4+1/5+1/6+1/8+1/10+1/15+1/30=333/120=2.775)=999 checks will run every hour, 24*999=23,976 every day and 30*23,976=719,280 every month.