Not sure which Backendless plan is right for your app? Don’t worry – you don’t need to be a developer or data scientist to figure it out. In fact, with just a few basic estimates, you can choose the plan that fits your needs (and your budget) pretty closely.
This guide walks you through it, step by step, using realistic numbers and plain English.
Start with how many people will be using your app per day. Not how many signed up – how many actually open it and do something.
Here’s a rough guide based on real-world behavior:
Small apps or hobbies → 5–10% of users are active daily
Community or tool-based apps → 10–30%
Business/internal apps → 50–90%
Example: If 1,000 people have signed up and you expect 20% to be active daily, that’s:
1,000 × 20% = 200 daily active users
This is called concurrent usage – how many people are using the app at the same moment. Most apps don’t have everyone online at once, and that’s okay.
Here’s a simple shortcut:
Take your daily active users
Assume they’re spread across the day
Estimate your app is mostly used over about 10 hours a day
Multiply the number of hourly users by how long each person typically uses the app
Formula:
Concurrent Users ≈ (Daily Active Users ÷ 10) × (Session Length in Minutes ÷ 60)
Let’s try it:
You have 200 daily users
They’re spread across 10 hours → ~20 users per hour
A typical session lasts 15 minutes
🎯 So you can expect about 5 users to be using the app at the same time on average.
Backendless pricing is based partly on how often your app talks to the backend. Each time a user logs in, sends data, retrieves a list, saves something, etc – that’s an API call.
You don’t need to count every click, but here’s a rough idea:
Simple apps (log in, fill out a form) → 20–40 calls/session
Social or real-time apps (chat, posts, updates) → 50–100 calls/session
Data-heavy apps (maps, files, complex filters) → 100+ calls/session
Let’s assume your app is somewhere in the middle:
Now combine what you know:
Concurrent Users = 5
API Calls per Session = 60
Session Duration = 15 minutes
To find the Requests Per Minute (RPM) – the number Backendless cares about – use this formula:
Plug in your numbers:
🎉 That’s your baseline usage – 20 RPM.
Now head to this page to check Backendless plan limits:
🔗 How Does Billing for Scale Fixed Plan Work?
Find the tier that handles at least your RPM + 20–30% extra, just to be safe. In this case, something that supports 25–30 RPM (Tier 4) will give you peace of mind. If your usage grows, you can change the supported tier anytime – no penalty, no stress.
You don’t need deep analytics or scary math. Just think:
How many people use the app each day?
How long do they use it?
How active is each session?
The steps above turn fuzzy guesses into a solid estimate that helps you pick a plan with confidence.