How much will your game backend actually cost?
Estimate monthly cost for PlayFab, Nakama Cloud, self-hosted Nakama, and Crux at your scale. Use the public price snapshot for fixed plan anchors, then model the workload. A MAU or CCU number alone is not enough to calculate every vendor’s bill.
2026 public price snapshot
These are price anchors, not interchangeable quotes. Service meters, game-server compute, traffic, storage, support, and eligibility rules can change the total.
| Platform | Public starting point | What actually drives the bill |
|---|---|---|
| Crux | $0 Dev to 10K MAU; $10 Launch to 25K; $79 Scale to 500K | MAU tier and included platform limits; no per-call billing |
| PlayFab | Free to Start (up to 10 titles and 1,000 lifetime players/title); PAYG has no monthly minimum; Standard $99/mo; Premium $1,999/mo | Service meters, plan allowances, title mode, Multiplayer Servers compute, storage, and egress |
| Nakama on Heroic Cloud | Resource-based pricing; select Nakama CPU and database CPU | CPU/database configuration and optional support; Heroic states there are no DAU/MAU/CCU limits |
| Nakama OSS | $0 software license | Compute, database, traffic, backups, monitoring, and engineering/on-call time |
Verified August 20, 2026. Sources: PlayFab pricing, Heroic Cloud pricing, Crux pricing, and Nakama.
Your game's profile
100 500,000
Distinct players who connect at least once per month. Drag the slider or type an exact number.
10 20,000
Highest number of simultaneous players. Rule of thumb: ~5% of MAU for casual, ~10% for competitive.
More regions = lower latency but higher infra cost on self-host paths.
Heavier feature set increases API call volume and Nakama runtime complexity.
Workload-aware planning view
Crux is calculated from its published MAU tiers. Self-hosted Nakama is an illustrative infrastructure floor. PlayFab and Heroic Cloud require vendor-specific meters or resource choices that these four inputs cannot determine.
About these estimates
- PlayFab: shown as a metered plan rather than a fabricated MAU total. Microsoft’s public pricing separates Free to Start, PAYG, Standard, Premium, service meters, and Multiplayer Servers.
- Nakama Cloud (Heroic Cloud): resource-based Nakama CPU plus database CPU; there is no fixed CCU tier model to infer from this form.
- Self-hosted Nakama: illustrative VPS, database, and traffic floor across the selected regions; it excludes engineering and on-call labor.
- Crux: published tiered pricing. Free at 10,000 MAU. Launch tier at 25k MAU. Scale tier at 500k MAU.
- None of these include realtime netcode (Mirror, Photon, Unity NGO) which sits at the network layer. See our Mirror comparison or Colyseus comparison.