Photon Fusion Pricing (2026): Free 100 CCU to $500/mo

The list price is the easy part. The details that change the bill are how Photon calculates Peak CCU across regions, what happens when you exceed the tier, and whether Fusion is running Shared/Host Mode or a third-party Dedicated Server.

Photon Fusion public-cloud pricing

Plan	Price	Included traffic	At the CCU limit
Development: 20 CCU	$0	60 GB/month	Hard cap; development/non-commercial use
Free launch: 100 CCU	$0	0.3 TB/month	Hard cap; one Fusion/Quantum app per customer
500 CCU	$125/month	1.5 TB/month	CCU Burst
1,000 CCU	$250/month	3 TB/month	CCU Burst
2,000 CCU	$500/month	6 TB/month	CCU Burst

The paid public plans bundle roughly 3 GB of Photon traffic per contracted CCU per month. Photon currently lists additional traffic at $0.05/GB in its lower-cost region group and $0.10/GB in the other listed regions.

The billing gotcha: Photon sums regional monthly peaks

Do not model your Photon subscription from one global concurrency graph. Photon documents Peak CCU as the sum of the monthly peak in each region.

Example: if EU peaks at 420 users on one evening and US peaks at 230 at a completely different time, Photon’s billing Peak CCU is 650, not the highest global simultaneous value you happened to observe. That workload needs the 1,000-CCU public plan unless you accept burst/overage behavior.

This matters most for games with timezone-separated audiences. A multi-region game can have a modest real-time global peak and still accumulate a higher billed regional-peak sum.

Free 100 CCU: useful, but know the rules

• The free 100-CCU commercial plan is currently for Fusion or Quantum games.
• It is limited to one application per studio/account across that free Fusion/Quantum slot.
• It is hard-capped: additional players are rejected once the app reaches the limit; there is no CCU Burst on this tier.
• Photon says the free plan is standalone and normally cannot be stacked with a paid monthly CCU plan (the documented Unity Asset Store Plus coupon is the exception).
• Once an app upgrades to a paid plan, Photon says that app cannot simply downgrade back to the free plan; the free slot becomes available for another eligible app.

Photon uses roughly 100 CCU ≈ 40,000 MAU as a planning rule of thumb. Treat that as an audience-shape estimate, not the billing formula. A launch spike can exceed 100 CCU with far fewer monthly players.

What happens above 500 CCU

The 500/1,000/2,000 public plans include CCU Burst. Photon does not immediately disconnect the players above the booked tier. Its current FAQ says that after burst begins, you are expected to upgrade to the required subscription within 48 hours; otherwise overage invoicing/capping rules can apply.

That is operationally friendlier than a hard launch cap, but it is not “unlimited free burst.” Alert on Peak CCU and have an upgrade runbook before a release or influencer spike.

Premium Cloud

For Fusion gaming, Photon currently lists Premium Cloud at $0.50 per CCU with a $1,000/month minimum. The minimum covers 2,000 CCU and 6 TB; usage-based autoscaling supports up to 50,000 CCU before the larger Enterprise shape. Photon also lists DDoS protection by default, with optional service levels/premium operations support.

Premium Cloud is still Photon networking/control-plane capacity. It is not a bundle of Linux/Unity dedicated game-server machines for Fusion Server Mode.

Server Mode adds a separate hosting bill

Fusion’s topology choice changes what else you pay for:

Topology	Who runs simulation authority?	Separate game-server compute?
Shared Mode	Shared-authority Fusion topology	No dedicated headless fleet required by the topology
Client Host	One player client acts as host	No dedicated headless fleet required
Dedicated Server / Server Mode	Your headless server build	Yes: third-party hosting/orchestration is your responsibility

Photon’s own Fusion guidance notes that in Server Mode, bandwidth cost shifts more toward the third-party server provider. Your full Server Mode cost therefore has at least three separate buckets:

1. Photon: Peak CCU + applicable Photon traffic/overage.
2. Game-server fleet: compute, server-network egress, regions, warm capacity, orchestration, logs and build delivery.
3. Persistent backend: account identity, progression/cloud saves, inventory/economy, leaderboards and trusted match-result storage if your game needs them.

There is no honest generic “$205, $425 total at 500 CCU” number. A 1v1 deterministic game and a 64-player physics-heavy dedicated server can share the same Photon CCU tier while having radically different compute costs. Measure your own headless process.

How to estimate your real monthly Fusion bill

1. Split CCU by Photon region and estimate each region’s monthly peak; sum those peaks.
2. Select the smallest public plan above that billing Peak CCU, or model Premium once its operating model makes more sense.
3. Estimate Photon traffic from real playtests, not packet-size guesses.
4. If using Server Mode, load-test one headless process to measure players/match per core, RAM and server egress.
5. Add warm capacity and failure headroom in each hosting region.
6. Add persistent-backend operations separately.
7. Alert on CCU burst so the 48-hour upgrade window is an operational event, not an invoice surprise.

Bottom line

Photon Fusion’s public price ladder is straightforward: $0 at 100 CCU, then $125 / $250 / $500 per month at 500 / 1,000 / 2,000 CCU. The non-obvious parts are regional Peak CCU aggregation, burst rules and the costs Photon does not own in Dedicated Server mode.

Price Photon networking, dedicated-server hosting and persistent backend as separate layers. That gives you a useful budget; adding an arbitrary VM range to the Photon subscription does not.