Cost Management

Billing is determined by your compute and storage usage. To estimate your cost based on your usage, use the unit prices available on the Billing tab of the Rockset Console. We also offer a consultative estimate, which you can request from the Billing tab of the Rockset Console. You can also use our Pricing Calculator to estimate your price based on region, edition, and expected compute and storage.

Compute Charges

Compute charges are determined by the Virtual Instance size you are using. A Virtual Instance (VI) is a cluster of compute resources for streaming ingest and executing queries. You can use multiple virtual instances to isolate different workloads and scale them up and down on demand. Compute charges will be incurred as long as the VI is running. Rockset meters compute on a per-minute basis.

VIs are divided into two categories: Shared and Dedicated.

• Shared Virtual Instances are more cost-effective for developing and come in 4 sizes: Free, Nano, Micro, and Milli. For some low-traffic use cases, Shared VIs are more than sufficient.
• If you’re looking for more predictable performance or you have a high-concurrency, high-performance workload, a dedicated compute tier is recommended. Dedicated VIs come in 8 sizes: Small, Medium, Large, XLarge, 2XLarge, 4XLarge, 8XLarge, and 16XLarge.

For more information on selecting the right VI size, visit our docs page on Virtual Instances. For a pricing breakdown for each VI size, visit the Billing tab of the Rockset Console.

Storage Charges

Data is stored in NVMe SSDs for fast data retrieval and cloud object storage for durability. Stored data can be accessed by any virtual instance. Rockset scales the storage as data volumes increase or decrease. There are compression techniques available to users to decrease the cost of storage. The size of your data compressed and indexed in RocksDB is the value used for billing purposes. Rockset meters storage on a per-minute basis and does not charge for the copy stored in cloud object storage for durability.

Storage costs are based on a tiered pricing model. Storage billing will be according the per-tier price for your respective storage range. For a pricing breakdown of storage, visit the Billing tab of the Rockset Console.

For more information on how data is stored and indexed, check out our docs page on Storage Architecture.

Editions

By default, all accounts are on the Standard edition of Rockset. We also offer a Premium edition which includes access to additional features. To decide which edition is the best fit for you, here is a comparison of the features included with each:

*Both Standard and Premium editions of Rockset are SOC 2 compliant. The SOC 2 TYPE II Compliance Certificate is available upon request for Premium accounts only.

If you're interested in a Premium edition, please contact Rockset Customer Support.

Pricing Examples

Example 1: Geosearch application

You start to develop a geosearch feature for your logistics tracking application using Rockset. As you are in development mode, you select a shared virtual instance, nano, for your workload.

You build your app on streaming data from Apache Kafka. You ingest 5 GiB of uncompressed data daily from Kafka. The total size of data on disk after compression and indexing for every day is 10GiB. You retain the data for 1 day. You use Rockset’s developer edition in AWS US-West.

Example 2: Recommendation engine

You go to production on a recommendation application using Rockset. Your recommendation application uses a small virtual instance during peak times, 30% of the month, and scales down to an XSmall virtual instance during off peak times, 70% of the month.

Your recommendation application is built on data from MongoDB. You have 500 GiB of data already in MongoDB and ingest 5GiB of change data from MongoDB every day during the month. Your total data size on disk after indexing and compression in Rockset remains at 500 GiB for the first 20 days and then increases to 700GiB for the last 10 days. You use Rockset’s general purpose instance class in the standard edition in AWS US-West.

Bulk ingest allows data ingestion for the initial data load to occur at speeds several orders of magnitude higher than typical streaming data ingestion.

Example 3: In-app search and analytics applications

You go to production on in-app search and analytics using Rockset. You isolate the search application from the analytics application using virtual instances.

The virtual instance for the search application uses a medium virtual instance for peak periods, 25% of the time, and a XSmall virtual instance for off peak periods, 75% of the time.

The virtual instance for the analytics application uses a small virtual instance for peak periods, 25% of the time, and an XSmall virtual instance for off peak periods, 75% of the time.

Your in-app search and analytics application is built on streaming data from Apache Kafka. You ingest 25 GiB of uncompressed data daily from Kafka. The total size of data on disk after compression and indexing for each day is 50 GiB. You retain the data for 30 days. You use Rockset’s general purpose instance class in the standard edition in AWS US-West.

Example 4: Real-time game telemetry

You go to production on an application that collects real-time game behavior data to inform development. You isolate the compute for ingestion and indexing from analytics for predictable performance at scale using virtual instances.

Your gaming data streams through Amazon Kinesis into Rockset for analysis. You ingest 500 telemetry events per second with an average size of 1 KiB per event. When retained for 30 days that is roughly 1,200 GiB of data. You use an XSmall virtual instance that can support streaming ingestion rates of 2 MiB/second.

The virtual instance for game analytics uses a Medium virtual instance for peak periods, 20% of the time, and a XSmall virtual instance for off peak periods, 80% of the time.

You use Rockset’s general purpose instance class in the standard edition in the AWS US-West region.

Example 5: Anomaly detection application

You are in development on an anomaly detection application using Rockset. Your anomaly detection application streams data from Confluent Cloud. You ingest 10 GB of uncompressed data daily from Confluent Cloud. The size of data on disk after compression and indexing for every day is 20 GB. You retain the data for 30 days.

As your total dataset size is 600 GB, over the storage size limit of shared virtual instances, you decide to use the standard edition in AWS US-West.

You do not require access to the freshest data to build your application and configure microbatching, setting the batching of ingestion in intervals of 2 hours. You use the Xsmall virtual instance with a peak streaming ingest rate of 2 MiB/s. Every 2 hours, 833 MiBs have accumulated which take 7 minutes to batch load into Rockset.

You use an XSmall virtual instance to test the performance of application queries. You spin up the virtual instance when building your application and spin down when you are done for the day. On average, you spend 4 hours a workday using the query virtual instance.

Other Costs

While the examples above highlight the main costs of using Rockset, compute and storage, here are the costs that can impact your total bill:

• Virtual instance(s): The instance class, size and region.
• Storage size: The amount of data stored.
• Edition: The developer, standard or premium edition.
• Bulk ingestion: One-time ingestion which is triggered during an initial data load for some data sources.
• Support plans: Add-on support and service plans.
• Dedicated streaming ingestion: Add-on dedicated streaming ingestion to support latency sensitive use cases.

Manage Costs

This documentation guide provides a general overview of the options available to help manage costs in Rockset.

Storage Costs

There are several methods available to further reduce the storage costs in Rockset including the following:

• Retention: Set a retention duration for a collection to automatically drop older data
• Compression: Compress data to reduce storage size using LZ4 and Zstandard
• Real-time aggregations: Rollup data or pre-aggregate data at ingest time, combining multiple documents into one
• Drop fields: Remove unnecessary columns or full documents from your source data using ingest transformations. Manually delete unnecessary data from your collections, Rockset is fully mutable.

There are more advanced cost controls for storage including the following:

• _stored field: _stored reduces the hot storage size by excluding fields of data from the inverted indexes and range indexes. This is an efficiency option when your use case involves metrics, aggregations or lookups.

Compute Costs

Rokset separates compute from compute. As a result, you can spin up and down isolated virtual instances for ingestion and queries. This makes it cost-effective to run multiple workloads, multi-tenant applications, dev/test environments and more on Rockset.

There are several methods available to reduce compute costs in Rockset including the following:

• Autosuspend virtual instances: Suspend a virtual instance after a period of inactivity ranging from 15 minutes to 12 hours
• Autoscale virtual instances: Autoscale a virtual Instance based on CPU utilization
• Scale down virtual instances: Scale down virtual instances with the click of a button or API call
• Microbatching: Load data in scheduled time internals to reduce the time a virtual instance runs
• Instance classes: The general purpose instance class is suitable for many production workloads

There are more advanced cost controls including the following:

• Scheduled Query Lambdas: Rockset query lambdas are REST API wrappers around parameterized SQL queries, hosted in Rockset. You can create schedules for the automatic execution of query lambdas and post the results of the queries to webhooks. There are multiple use cases for scheduled query lambdas, including the ability to create incremental materializations. For workloads that are less latency sensitive and involve complex queries, this can help save on compute.
• Query results pagination: When a query returns a large number of records, fetching all of them at once can be inefficient and resource-intensive. Pagination allows you to retrieve and display a specific subset of the results, typically based on a defined page size (e.g. 100 records per page).

Management Costs

Rockset is a fully-managed service and eliminates the operational overhead of managing data engineering and infrastructure operations.

Rockset features that enable you to curb management costs:

• Schemaless ingestion: Rockset has a flexible data and query model. It supports deeply nested semi-structured data without requiring any upfront data preparation. This makes it easy to introduce new data types and make changes to your schema.
• SQL-based transformations: Rockset offers optional transformations at ingest time, reducing upstream ETL jobs.
• SQL APIs: Query lambdas are named, parameterized SQL queries stored in Rockset that can be executed from a dedicated REST endpoint.
• Fully-managed service: Rockset is offered as a SaaS service and eliminates all server and cluster operations. No managing indexes, shards and nodes.
• Continuous deployments: Rockset continuously deploys new features and has no scheduled downtime.
• Durability: Rockset is designed for durability, storing a copy of your data in cloud object storage at no extra cost.
• High availability: Rockset supports multi-region hot-cold and hot-hot deployment options for fault tolerance in the case of availability zone or region failures.
• Regulatory compliance: Rockset is SOC 2 Type II, GDPR, CCPA and HIPAA compliant, allowing you to benefit from the security certificates already achieved.

Support Plans

By default, all accounts are provided Basic Support. We offer three different support plans with the following features:

If you're interested in upgrading your support plan, please contact Rockset Customer Support.

Free Version

You can use Rockset for free by using the Free Virtual Instance and staying below the 2GB of free storage. To switch your Virtual Instance, go to the Virtual Instances tab of the Rockset Console and select Free from the size dropdown menu.

Billing Support

If you have any additional questions on how billing works at Rockset, please contact Rockset Customer Support. If you have any questions regarding an invoice or an incorrect charge, please contact Rockset Billing Staff.