Billing and MAU
How HotCodePush counts monthly active devices, what each plan costs, how the spending cap bounds the bill and what the invoice and a refund look like.
A monthly active device (MAU) is one device that checked for an update in a UTC calendar month, counted per app. It is the one billing unit. The plans below carry the prices, and the spending cap you set bounds the month's cost.
The calculator on the pricing page turns a MAU number into a monthly price.
Monthly active devices
A device counts as active for an app the first time it checks for an update in a month, taken from its first report.
- Counted per app: one phone running three of your apps is three MAU.
- Counted once: further checks by the same device in the same month add nothing.
- Counted whatever the device is: debug builds, simulators and test devices count like any install.
- Never uncounted: deleting a device does not reduce the month's count.
- The month is the UTC calendar month, also the billing period.
The console's Usage page, hotcodepush usage get and GET /v1/organizations/{organizationId}/usage show the month's MAU and data transfer per app, with a CSV download. The MAU count is live, the data transfer a day behind.
Plans
| Plan | Price | Includes |
|---|---|---|
| Free | free, no credit card | Includes 1,000 MAU a month and every safety feature: code signing, auto-pause and staged rollouts. |
| Pay-as-you-go | $5 a month, covering the first 5,000 MAU, then $1 per 1,000 MAU | Includes unlimited data transfer, storage and apps within fair use, plus the audit log, webhooks, single sign-on, the two-factor requirement, the network restrictions and the 99.9 percent SLA. |
| Enterprise | custom invoicing | Includes everything in Pay-as-you-go, plus a MAU limit by contract, a dedicated account manager, priority support, longer retention, and compliance documentation, audit reports, security questionnaires and procurement support on request. |
A Pay-as-you-go organization buys its MAU from zero: $5 buys 5,000 and $10 buys 10,000. Subscribe on the console's billing page or with hotcodepush checkout create.
The first period carries no $5 fee: the days until the next first of the month are free of the minimum. Usage above 5,000 MAU in them goes on the first invoice. Billing then runs per calendar month, charged on the first for the month that ended.
The spending cap
| Rule | Value |
|---|---|
| Starting cap | Every new subscription starts at $5. |
| Range | The cap is whole dollars from $5 to $10,000, which buys 10 million MAU. Above that, Enterprise bills by contract. |
| Who sets it | Owners, Admins and the Billing role set it, on the console's billing page, with hotcodepush organization update --spending-cap or through the organization's update operation of the Swagger reference. |
| Raising | A raise applies within about a minute. Devices that reported beyond the previous cap are counted in the order they reported, up to the new cap. |
| Lowering | A cut applies at once. A cap below the month's counted MAU stops counting further devices, and the counted ones stay billed. |
| Warnings | One mail goes out at 80 percent of the cap and one at the cap, once a month each, to the Owners and the Billing role, and to the Owners alone on the Free plan. A cap change mails the Owners, the Billing role and the person who changed it. |
The cap buys a number of MAU for the month, never the right to release. Uploads, releases, rollouts, rollbacks and the console keep working at the cap.
A device beyond the cap keeps running what it has, the fail-open guarantee. It receives nothing new until the month turns or the cap is raised, and its check ends in skipped with spending_cap_reached.
Every cap event is an audit log row and a webhook event: organization.spending_cap_changed, organization.spending_cap_warning and organization.spending_cap_reached.
The invoice
Polar is the merchant of record: it issues the invoice, charges the card, handles VAT and runs the customer portal. The console's billing page and hotcodepush customer-portal-session create open the portal.
An invoice carries two lines: the month's $5 fee, and "Billable monthly active devices", the counted MAU beyond the first 5,000 at $0.001 per device. A device beyond the cap is never counted, so the invoice cannot exceed the cap.
Polar retries a failed payment and mails you, and nothing changes while the subscription is past due. If it becomes unpaid, devices not yet counted that month receive no updates until the month ends, while counted ones keep updating, and nothing is deleted. A successful payment restores the cap at once.
Cancelling returns the organization to Free at the period's end, and a later subscription starts at the $5 cap again.
Refunds
Refunds go back to the payment method, on a mail to support@hotcodepush.com naming the invoice.
- A first charge is refunded in full on request within 14 days.
- A charge caused by a cap you raised yourself is refunded once, in full.
- Anything else is partial or declined, decided by a person.
An SLA credit is paid the same way, as a partial refund of the month's charge.
Enterprise
Enterprise is sold by email to sales@hotcodepush.com: invoicing, a data processing agreement, a security questionnaire answered once and reused, custom limits and longer retention. It is invoiced from the month-end summary of MAU and data transfer. The contract names a MAU limit in place of the spending cap, or no limit at all.
No payment failure pauses an Enterprise organization's updates. When a contract ends without renewal, the organization returns to Free and the running month counts against its 1,000 MAU.
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Audit log
What the HotCodePush audit log records, the event types per object, how to filter it by object, actor, app and time, and how to download it as a CSV file.
Limits and fair use
Every limit HotCodePush enforces, from the 512 MB bundle size to the rate limits, with what happens at each one, its error code and how to ask for a raise.