PlayFab vs Crux (2026): Foundation Mode, Pricing & Features

The phrase “PlayFab free tier” now refers to different things, which is why pricing summaries conflict. Foundation Mode is tied to the Xbox publishing ecosystem and blocks excluded APIs. Development Mode is a limited evaluation mode. Paid live-title plans meter services such as events, profile operations, statistics, storage, Party, and Multiplayer Servers. Choose the row that matches your title before estimating a bill.

PlayFab plan pricing in 2026

Mode or plan	Base price	Who it is for	Important limit
Foundation Mode	$0 for included services	Eligible studios shipping or planning to ship on Xbox	Preview eligibility; excluded services are blocked
Development Mode	$0	Evaluation and development	Up to 1,000 lifetime player accounts per title; up to 10 development titles
Pay-as-you-go	$0 monthly minimum	Live titles that want usage billing	Pay per service meter
Standard	$99/month	Live titles needing included usage and support tickets	Included meters valued at $400, then pay-as-you-go
Premium	$1,999/month	Larger titles needing a bigger meter bundle and emergency escalations	Included meters valued at $8,000, then pay-as-you-go
Enterprise	Starts at $10,000/month	Custom commercial and support requirements	Contact Microsoft

Foundation Mode: free, but not a generic free tier

Foundation Mode is available to developers who register a studio, ship or plan to ship on Xbox, and link the PlayFab account to the relevant Partner Center studio and product. During the documented preview it is for new PlayFab titles only; Microsoft says existing-title migration is planned for late 2026, not available today.

Included services cover identity, title data and communications, Azure Functions invocation, system-generated telemetry and reports, Lobby, Matchmaking, Party networking, friends, groups, bans, modern leaderboards/statistics, profiles, game saves, catalog, and inventory. Microsoft says the included services have no monthly usage caps, although API rate limits still apply.

Not everything is included. Foundation Mode blocks PlayFab Multiplayer Servers, UGC, classic CloudScript, Segmentation, Experimentation, Churn Prediction, CDN, custom telemetry ingestion, Event Archive, Rules/Actions/Webhooks, and several legacy APIs. Azure Functions compute is billed separately through Azure.

Development Mode vs the old “100K players free” headline

Microsoft's current plan table says Development Mode supports up to 1,000 lifetime players per title. The same pricing page also carries a broad “$0/month before your title passes 100K players” marketing line, but that is not the Development Mode account limit. Do not treat 100K as a blanket entitlement: check the specific service meters and the mode selected for the title.

What pay-as-you-go meters

PlayFab's bill is the sum of the services a title uses, each with its own unit and its own rate. That is why no single price per monthly active user exists: two titles with identical player counts can differ by an order of magnitude depending on which meters they hit. The current pay-as-you-go rate card:

Meter	Rate
Profile reads	$0.33 per million
Profile writes	$7.15 per million
Profile storage	$1.54 per GB
Statistics reads / writes	$0.062 / $0.63 per million
Leaderboard reads / writes	$0.10 / $0.50 per million
PlayStream events	$6.60 per million
Telemetry events	$2.75 per million
Economy V2 inventory reads / writes	$3.00 / $40.00 per million
Party connectivity / voice	$0.000004 / $0.0001 per additional player minute
Data egress	Free in-region; $0.02/GB intra-continental; $0.05/GB inter-continental

Read that as a shape rather than a total. An inventory write costs roughly 120 times a profile read per million, so an economy-heavy title and a leaderboard-heavy title with the same audience produce very different invoices. Payload-size blocks and regional egress make call count alone an incomplete estimate, and Multiplayer Servers compute is metered separately again.

Standard and Premium are not unlimited flat plans. They add a monthly base charge, included usage bundles, and different support access; usage beyond the included meters is still billed. Current customers should use the Billing Summary's month-to-date estimate and downloadable CSV instead of reconstructing an invoice from MAU.

PlayFab Multiplayer Servers cost

Multiplayer Servers is separate consumption-priced compute. The evaluation allowance documented by Microsoft includes 750 Dasv4 core-hours in East US and 750 in North Europe, plus 10 GB of network egress in each of Zones 1 and 2, with simultaneous-core limits. A live fleet also pays for standby capacity and regional egress. Use Microsoft's MPS calculator with players per process, processes per VM, standby percentage, average concurrency, peak concurrency, and egress per player.

How PlayFab compares with Crux pricing

Question	PlayFab	Crux
Free production path	Foundation Mode for eligible Xbox titles and included features	10,000 MAU with every BaaS feature included; Runtime compute is separate and ships a finite evaluation allowance
Paid base	PAYG $0 minimum; Standard $99; Premium $1,999	Launch $10; Scale $79
Primary billing model	Per-service meters and plan bundles	Capacity tiers based mainly on MAU, API calls, and storage
Dedicated server hosting	Multiplayer Servers: general-purpose managed fleet, multiple VM sizes and regions, separately metered compute	Bring your own host and register it, or use Crux Runtime for a Godot 4 Linux server. Runtime compute is metered separately from the BaaS tier
Feature breadth	Broader enterprise Game Stack and LiveOps surface	Smaller backend primitive set for indie and mid-size teams

That makes neither product universally cheaper. An Xbox title whose needs fit Foundation Mode can pay $0 for a broad PlayFab core. A non-Xbox indie that wants predictable backend primitives may find Crux's capacity tiers easier to budget. A large title should model actual service meters and support requirements.

Feature comparison

Pricing only decides anything once both products can do the job. This is the capability surface, with Foundation Mode broken out because it includes far more than a typical free tier and excludes a specific list.

Capability	PlayFab	In Foundation Mode	Crux
Player identity and auth	Yes	Included	Email/guest, Google/GitHub/Discord OAuth, native Steam ticket verification
Player data and saves	Yes	Included	Yes, persistent JSON documents
Leaderboards and statistics	Yes	Included	Yes
Achievements	Yes	Included	Yes
Economy, catalog and inventory	Yes, Economy V2	Included	Currencies/inventory mutations; no generalized catalog/store/receipt layer
Friends and groups	Yes	Included	Friends yes; no groups equivalent
Live config / title data	Yes	Included	Yes
Matchmaking	Yes	Included	Exact game_mode + region pairing; no SBMM/party/backfill rules engine
Lobby	Yes	Included	No managed lobby service; server registry/browser is a separate primitive
Server registry and browser	Via Multiplayer Servers and Lobby	Lobby only, MPS excluded	Yes, first-class
Party networking and voice	Yes, PlayFab Party	Included	No equivalent
Server-side custom logic	Azure Functions and CloudScript	Functions invocation included, billed via Azure; classic CloudScript excluded	No generic equivalent
Segmentation, experimentation, churn prediction	Yes	Excluded	No equivalent
User-generated content platform	Yes	Excluded	No equivalent
Dedicated server compute	Multiplayer Servers, general purpose	Excluded	Runtime v0: Godot 4, Linux x86-64, native PC clients, ENet/UDP, EU region, one fixed server shape, ephemeral 2 to 16 player sessions
Engine SDKs	Broad, Unity and Unreal first	Included	Unity, Godot, JavaScript/TypeScript, Roblox and Unreal

Which one to pick

Pick PlayFab when you are eligible for Foundation Mode and its included list covers your game, since that is a broad core for $0. Also pick it when you need Party networking or voice, LiveOps segmentation and experimentation, generic server-side custom code, a user-generated content platform, a mature general-purpose managed server fleet, or Microsoft's cross-platform identity ecosystem. At AAA and large live-service scale, its track record is the argument.

Pick Crux when your required primitives fit the surface above, predictable capacity tiers matter more than maximum breadth, Godot or Roblox is central to your stack, you want a server registry and backend without coupling application logic to Azure-specific services, or you are shipping a Godot server and want the deployment path handled rather than building a fleet. Runtime v0 is deliberately narrow and is not a replacement for Multiplayer Servers.

Both products have switching costs. PlayFab's are larger because more of the surface is Azure-shaped, but Crux is still a vendor API with its own auth, schemas and matchmaking semantics. The honest comparison is lower versus higher coupling, not locked in versus free.

How to estimate your PlayFab bill

1. Choose Foundation, Development, PAYG, Standard, or Premium based on eligibility and launch state.
2. List the exact services the title will call; do not estimate from MAU alone.
3. Measure average payload size, reads/writes per active player, events, retained storage, and egress.
4. Model Multiplayer Servers and Party separately.
5. For an existing title, use Billing Summary and its CSV as the source of truth.

Pricing, alternatives, and migration are separate intents

This page owns PlayFab pricing. If the decision is which product to choose, read PlayFab alternatives for indie studios. If the decision is how to leave, use the PlayFab migration guide or the Crux-specific checklist.