Billing/API Count impact of brainCloud Portal-triggered operations

jongdae.won

Hello brainCloud team,

We would like to better understand how billing/API Counts apply to operations triggered from the brainCloud Portal.

Our question is not limited to one specific feature. We are trying to clarify the general rule for Portal actions that execute backend operations, such as:

Refreshing or re-evaluating segments
Refreshing promotions/pricing for users
Running operations from API Explorer or S2S Explorer
Triggering batch/user-processing jobs
Other Portal buttons that may cause server-side processing

Could you please clarify:

Are backend operations triggered from the Portal counted toward billable API Counts or other usage metrics?
If yes, is the billing rule the same as calling the equivalent Client API, S2S API, or Cloud Code operation directly?
Are there Portal actions that are considered admin/configuration operations and are not billed as API Counts?
For operations that process many users or records, how is usage calculated?
- Once per Portal action?
- Once per underlying API operation?
- Once per user/record processed?
- Or based on bulk-operation rules?
Where can we verify Portal-triggered usage in the brainCloud reports?
- Is there a specific service/operation naming pattern we should look for?
Are scheduled/internal maintenance operations, such as automatic segment refreshes, billed differently from manually triggered Portal operations?

We are asking because we want to avoid unexpectedly increasing API usage or costs when using Portal features in production, especially for actions that may process many users.

Thank you!

Paul Winterhalder

Hi,

API calls triggered by the backend DO count towards API usage -- so using the API Explorer to make calls do get counted as API calls. So - if you use API explorer to trigger a user batch job that then runs scripts on all of your users - yes, yes that does get counted as API calls.

Also - uploads of files to and from the portal do get counted in the file transfer costs.

Other normal portal operations - like viewing users, viewing logs, editing scripts, etc - do NOT get charged in API counts. So to clarify - using the API explorer to view a leaderboard is going to add an API count - but using the leaderboard viewer at App > Global > Leaderboards > Leaderboards does not!

To be honest - in general - usaging of the portal is negligible. You won't really notice the usage added by what you're doing in the API explorer or working through the portal. It's only if you use the API Explorer to kick off a large job that API counts would be noticable <-- as you'd expect!

I hope that helps!

Paul.