SupabaseS
Supabase•2y ago
Sergio Luciano

Question about what counts as a message in real time

Hey all. I'm trying to understand how much messages would my app send in Supabase.

I'm creating a whiteboard like Miro, but for specific use cases. My customers can invite 10 guests to their Whiteboard. Now, my doubt.

What count as a message, in this whiteboard? Let me give an example. I will treat user as my customer and their guests.

  1. A user move a post-it from point A to point B. This movement is being broadcasted in real time to the other 9 users.
  2. The 9 users can see the post it moving around, while the user is moving it. If he moves that, makes a circle, and keep moving, the 9 users will keep seeing those moves while he holds the post it.
  3. Then, the user leaves the post it in another position.
So, the questions:

  1. How the amount of messages are calculated in this case? One? Or various, while he moves?
  2. If they are various messages, how can I know the amount of messages? Or, at least, estimate?
I'm asking that because if I want to create something like a whiteboard, and I have a 5 million messages per month in the plan and 2.5USD per million, if the users move post its around, during 30 minutes... it seems it would be a thousands of messages being broadcasted and the message cost would be really high, when I start to count it for hundreds of customers using it 4 days in a week.

Can you help me clarify that? The other costs I can easily understand and preview, but the message cost is very unclear to me in this case.
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