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Modal bills GPU compute by the second with scale-to-zero. We decode the 2026 per-GPU rate card, the keep-warm idle trap, three real 30-day bills, and the ~73% utilization crossover versus a rented pod.
Braintrust bills by evaluation scores (rows x scorers x runs), not seats. We decode the meter, find the ~199,000-score Pro crossover, work three 30-day bills, and show a one-lever fix that cut a bill 71%.
Unkey's API-key pricing is a step ladder, not a slope. We map the effective cost per million valid requests, find the threshold cliff, and run three 30-day bills.
Liveblocks does not bill by monthly active users. It meters collaboration minutes at $0.002 each, and an AI copilot counts as a participant. Here is the 2026 rate card, three worked 30-day bills, and the one lever that takes $480 back to $16.
Northflank pricing in 2026 is a per-hour meter on the vCPU and memory you allocate: $0.01667 per vCPU-hour and $0.00833 per GB-hour, plus $0.15/GB-month disk and $0.06/GB egress. The named nf-compute plans are just that meter times 720 hours, not discounts, and the bill is almost always dominated by memory you requested and never used.
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%.
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.
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%.
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.
