Calculators and money-honest breakdowns for founders who run the numbers.
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48 posts
Ably pricing in 2026 in real numbers: the three-meter model, why a message is counted per delivery, three worked 30-day bills, and the one lever that cut a sample bill 48.8%.
Trigger.dev pricing in 2026 runs on two meters: $0.25 per 10,000 runs plus a per-compute-second charge set by machine size, drawn from monthly credits (Free $5, Hobby $10, Pro $50). A light side project stays free; a busy agentic workload can pass $1,000/month, 99% of it compute. Because waits are checkpointed and not billed, moving in-process sleeps to native waits is the single biggest lever.
LaunchDarkly's 2026 pricing no longer charges per seat. The paid Foundation plan meters two lines: $10 per service connection per month plus $8.33 per 1,000 client-side monthly active users (MAU). The MAU meter bills your highest-volume context kind, so a 500,000-device app pays $4,165 a month on MAU alone even with far fewer logged-in users. A worked mid-size bill lands near $4,565 a month, about 91% driven by the MAU meter. Seats are free; the meter that hurts is client-side MAU.
Tinybird's 2026 pricing bills vCPU-seconds, not queries or storage. One always-on vCPU is $518.40/month. Here is the worked 30-day bill and the only lever that cuts it.
As of July 2026, Knock's notification API charges per message, where a message is one delivery to one user on one channel. The Starter plan is $250 per month for 50,000 messages, then $0.005 each. Because Knock meters per channel, a single notification sent to email, push, and in-app counts as three messages, so a 5,000-user app fanning three channels can run about $750 per month. The same alerts cost roughly $250 on Courier's per-notification meter and about $54 on Novu's per-run Pro plan. Match the meter to your channel fan-out before you pick a vendor.
Axiom bills on two meters, data loaded and query compute, not host count. A 2026 teardown with the free tier, the $25 flat band, three worked bills and the query-compute trap that quietly doubles the invoice.
Pusher Channels pricing in 2026 runs from a free Sandbox (100 concurrent connections, 200k messages/day) to $49 Startup, $99 Pro, $299 Business, and up to $1,199, billed on two meters: peak concurrent connections and messages per day. The trap is peak connections, because your plan must cover your highest simultaneous connection count, so a single 25-minute spike can push you from $99 to $499 for the whole month. This teardown works three real monthly bills, shows why the same app costs $99 on Pusher, about $278 on Ably, and about $630 on Liveblocks purely because each bills on a different meter, and does the self-host crossover math with Soketi.
Convex pricing in 2026, broken down: the $25/developer seat cost, the database-bandwidth meter that bills every document your queries scan, three worked 30-day bills, and the single index that cut a sample bill 35%.
Langfuse pricing in 2026 starts free (Hobby: 50,000 units per month), then $29/month (Core), $199 (Pro), and $2,499 (Enterprise), with extra units at $8 per 100,000. The catch: a unit is every trace, observation, and score, so one multi-step agent request can burn 20 or more units. That is why a busy agent app pays far more than its request count suggests.
Inngest pricing meters every step, not every job. Here are the real 2026 rates, three worked 30-day bills, and the two meters (step count and concurrency) that actually spike your invoice.
WorkOS pricing in 2026 is free for authentication up to 1 million monthly active users, then $2,500 per additional 1M. The real cost is enterprise features: SSO and Directory Sync (SCIM) run $125 per connection per month each, dropping to $50 at scale. Your WorkOS bill is driven by how many enterprise customers you have, not how many users.
PlanetScale killed its free tier, so what does it really cost in 2026? A numbers-first teardown: the full price ladder, a worked monthly bill for a small production app, and the exact usage point where a cheaper database like Neon wins.
