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AWS Estimating Costs and Cost Charts (Alpha)

This document explains how to estimate your costs. For a full description on:

  • How do costs work for Hubs Cloud?
  • Minimizing costs - Recommended user story
  • Minimizing costs - Settings in stack template

See our Costs and Minimizing Costs Information page.

Disclaimer for Estimating Costs​

Estimating costs is difficult because AWS bills by resource usage and everyone uses Hubs differently. Below are estimates from our tests and should not be used as a source of truth for your AWS Hubs Cloud costs.

Are these estimates within range for you? Accuracy Assessment Hubs Cloud AWS Cost Charts

Accurately Predict Future Costs - AWS Cost Explorer​

For the most accurate way to see previous costs to predict your future costs enable:

Estimate your Event Cost​

Read the Recommended User Story in Minimizing Costs Page first, to understand this calculation better.

Rough Calculation for Estimating Costs​

Are these estimates within range for you? Accuracy Assessment Hubs Cloud AWS Cost Charts

  • # of servers = Personal (1 server), Enterprise multi-server (varies, 2 app x 2 stream = 4 servers)
  • # Hours in state expected to be in estimated Scalar state
  • Cost for EC2 (US\$/hr) see below estimate cost charts (alpha)
  • SCALAR Roughly estimate costs of running other services like RDS, EFS, and Data transfer costs.
    • 5x - roughly TOP ACTIVE CAPACITY, estimate a hard upper bound and heavy other service use: top CCU capacity, streaming videos, large scenes, avatars moving and talking.
    • 4x - AVERAGE USE for other service: no videos, some people connected
    • 2x, 3x - ACTIVE, a few people are connected, setting up development environment or creating scenes
    • 2x - ONLINE, NOT ACTIVE, database pausing is off
    • 1.2x - ONLINE, NOT ACTIVE, not connected and database pausing is on
    • ~ 0x - Offline mode, paying only for scene, avatar assets and backups
    • To understand these states, read Recommended User Story in Minimizing Costs Page
  • Use AWS's cost explorer to estimate previous costs for future ones.

THE FORMULA​

Estimate for stack state (\$) = # Hours in state x Cost for EC2 (US\$/hr) x # of servers x SCALAR (#)

Hubs Cloud Cost Rough Estimate​

  1. Base cost (easier to estimate) = Setup Cost + Off-time (Scaled down "Online Not Active" or "Offline")
  2. Min Total Event Cost = Min Top Capacity Est. + Base cost
  3. Max Total Event Cost = Max Top Capacity Estimated + Base cost

EXAMPLE COST ESTIMATE​

Event with expected 500 CCU for 4 hours for 2 days. Cost charts estimate an Enterprise 2x2 c5.xlarge instance is sufficient.

  1. Calculate Top Capacity Min to Max Range

    • Minimum Top Capacity Est. (~ \$103.68) = (4hrs x 2days) x (\$1.08 - c5.xlarge) x (4 - Enterprise 2x2) x 3 SCALAR
      • 3x SCALAR reasoning - people will be connected, with a few streaming videos in rooms
    • Max Top Capacity Est. (~ \$172.80) = (4hrs x 2days) x (\$1.08 - c5.xlarge) x (4 - Enterprise 2x2) x 5 SCALAR
      • 5x SCALAR reasoning - upper bound for costs just in case

  2. Off-time, I'm putting the instance in offline mode.

    • ~$0 - ~$10 for storing backups
    • If you want the instance to be online, do THE FORMULA calculation for a different instance size. Use x1.2 SCALAR for database pausing and x2 SCALAR for database pausing off.

  3. During setup/development, I use the t3.medium. I need to create scenes + deploy a custom client. I estimate that will take me an active 16 hours.

    • Development cost (~ $43) = (16 hrs) x ($0.224 - t3.medium) x (4 - Enterprise 2x2) x 3 (reasoning, upper bound for costs just in case)

EXAMPLE TOTAL COST ESTIMATE​

  1. Base cost = (Setup = \$43) + (Off-time = ~ \$0) = ~ \$43
  2. Min Total Event Cost = (Min Top Capacity Est. = ~ \$103.68) + (Base cost = ~ \$43) = ~ \$146.68
  3. Max Total Event Cost = (Max Top Capacity Est. = ~ \$172.80) + (Base cost = ~ \$43) = ~ \$216.80

Rough HC Cost Range for Example Event = ~ \$146.68 - ~ \$216.80

Minimize # Hours at top Capacity to Minimize Cost​

If you are diligent with decreasing the # of hours at top capacity, outlined in the minimizing costs user story, your event costs can be extremely low especially when comparing an in-person event:

  • Scale the EC2 instance down during lower traffic
  • Turn on offline mode (costs are extremely minimal because the EC2 costs + RDS costs + EFS costs are down and you're only storing backups)
  • Enable database pausing
  • Use Cloudflare for content CDN - not recommended if you're streaming videos
  • Read more about these settings in minimizing costs user story

EC2 Server Type Recommendations​

See Cost Charts BELOW to factor costs with the recommendations.

t3.medium is recommended for development/setup with only a few users connecting + setting rooms + scenes.

Note: This does not exclude the t3.small, see what works for you. Scale the server type up or down ad hoc via updating the stack.

c4.large is recommended for during an event.

Note: This does not exclude any other instances types, see what works for you. Scale the server type up or down ad hoc based on performance via updating the stack.

We do not recommend using a t3.micro because of low memory.

Why Enterprise 2 app x 2 stream?​

We recommend using an Enterprise 2x2 multi-server setup to optimize for resiliency. If one server goes down suddenly, the other will take its place without your users noticing.

Scale vertically before scaling horizontally. Horizontal scaling can result in running out of Let's Encrypt Certificates between servers (we've seen this for 12x12 builds).

For very large events 4x4 and 8x8 Enterprise multiserver stacks are recommended.

Estimate Costs Charts (Alpha)​

How to read and use Cost Charts (Alpha)​

  • CCU is the concurrent users connected on an instance.
  • vCPU (#) is defined by the EC2 Server Type see Amazon EC2 Instance Types Documentation.
  • CCU Min - Max CCU for active avatars (lot of avatar movement, talking, at a meetup, etc.)
  • CCU Max - Max CCU for mostly inactive avatars (only watching a video, 1 avatar speaking)
  • Cost for EC2 (US\$/hr) - Cost per hour for running the EC2 instance type in us-east-1 (N. Virginia).
  • Note: t3.micro, t3.small, t3.medium have smaller CCU/vCPU because of past performance experience and lower memory.

Below are our CCU estimates for best performance. Performance may vary depending on client power: high power devices (Desktop/VR) vs. low power devices (Mobile).

Use the Rough calculation section to get estimates.

To see how vCPU to CCU Min/Max was estimated see AWS Estimated CCU Limits.

Estimating Personal / Enterprise Costs with 1 server​

How to read and use Alpha Cost Charts

EC2 Server TypevCPU (#)CCU MinCCU MaxCost for EC2 (US\$/hr)
t3.micro NOT recommended2N/AN/A\$0.024
t3.small21020\$0.035
t3.medium22040\$0.056
t3.large24080\$0.183
t3.xlarge480160\$0.266
t3.2xlarge8160320\$0.433
c4.large24080\$0.200
c5.large24080\$0.185
c5.xlarge480160\$0.270
c5.2xlarge8160320\$0.440
c5.4xlarge16320640\$0.780
c5.9xlarge367201,440\$1.630
c5.12xlarge489601,920\$2.140
c5.18xlarge721,4402,880\$3.160
c5.24xlarge961,9203,840\$4.180

Estimating Enterprise Costs for 4 servers​

2 app x 2 streaming servers recommended for best performance. Why?

How to read and use Alpha Cost Charts

EC2 Server TypeTotal vCPU (#)Min CCUMax CCUCost for EC2 (US\$/hr)
t3.micro NOT recommended8N/AN/A\$0.096
t3.small880160\$0.140
t3.medium880160\$0.224
t3.large8240400\$0.732
t3.xlarge16480800\$1.064
t3.2xlarge329601,600\$1.732
c4.large8240400\$0.800
c5.large8240400\$0.740
c5.xlarge16480800\$1.080
c5.2xlarge329601,600\$1.760
c5.4xlarge641,9203,200\$3.120
c5.9xlarge1444,3207,200\$6.520
c5.12xlarge1925,7609,600\$8.560
c5.18xlarge2888,64014,400\$12.640
c5.24xlarge38411,52019,200\$16.720

Are these estimates within range for you?​

Tell us here: Accuracy Assessment Hubs Cloud AWS Cost Charts