Firebase Storage Pricing explanation

[Alec Williams]

Hey, I'm just trying to make sense of what "GB stored" (Realtime Database, Storage) and "Stored Data" (Firestore) actually means, or rather how they're billed.

Does the price in the Blaze plan refer to 1GB per Month? I'm asking because it isn't mentioned in the pricing calculator, and you'd assume it's a one off price in relation to how big your data grows (similar to buying a physical harddrive).

I'm particularly asking for the Realtime Database, because my fear is that if it's actually billed monthly and the user data per person growth (e.g. people texting each other a lot) that the price will become unsustainably high per per person, if "older" or less relevant data isn't transfered into Storage or the Cheaper Cloud Firestore after a certain period.

E.g. I recently downloaded all my Facebook chats and it was like 1 GB, so if Facebook was hosted on the Firebase Realtime Database, they'd pay $5 per month for me just to have all my messages stored? (This is of course just a theoretical question, of course Facebook puts their own older data in cheaper low latency storage but I just wanted to give the example to illustrate my point)

all the very best

Alec

[Samuel Stern]

Hi Alec.

All of those prices are monthly, so yes it is $5/GB/month for the Realtime Database.  That's stated on this page but your email is good feedback that our pricing is not clear enough in table form.  While it's true that RTDB is a relatively expensive place to store data (especially when compared to higher latency products), it's also possible you're over-estimating data storage needs.  

In your example of chat data, 1GB is a huge amount!  I'm not sure how much metadata is stored with a chat in Facebook's format, so that could be most of it.  Let's do some napkin math (all relevant napkin math disclaimers apply).  A page of a normal book is about ~300 words.  Each word is ~5 letters and a space, so 6 bytes if it's ASCII.  This means 1800 bytes per page.  So in 1GB of text with no metadata, you could have ~560,000 novel-length pages of text!  That's an enormous amount to type in a chat window.

As you said, it could be a good idea to move "cold" data to somewhere less expensive over time if your application is really huge.  In that case you'd only keep data in RTDB that benefits from the low-latency sync capabilities of that product.

- Sam

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