Redirect Notice

As of April 12th, you must go to Progress SupportLink to create new support cases or to access existing cases. Please, bookmark the SupportLink URL and use the new portal to contact the support team.

You will be automatically redirected to SupportLink in 10 seconds.

How can we help you today?

Start a new topic
Discussions Kinvey Forums General Discussion

Anonymous users -- Paid users

Hi, I am working on choosing best platform for my App. I read various posts but it is not clear when a user request counts to a paid user. My app is a listing service where in users can browse/bid until they want to buy an item. So use case would be users will be just browsing the listing but would have to register once they bid or buy an item. I understand the registered users will be treated as paid user from Kinvey perspective. What about the requests made by users who have not registered? Will these non registered(anonymous) users be treated as paid users? I would like to know the pricing in this case. Thanks, VJ
5 CommentsSorted by Oldest First
Also can we use a single "free account" for all browsing users? Will this be treated as a one paid account by Kinvey?

Hi,


If I understand correctly, you want to allow users can browse freely without logging in. But, a user must signup/login to do bid or buy.


While using Kinvey, if you refer to the documentation - http://devcenter.kinvey.com/android/guides/users#ActiveUser, you will find following salient points:

  1. To retrieve data from collections, a user session must be established.
  2. There are two types of users, implicit (automatically created) and explicit user.

What that means is you will need to establish a Kinvey user session even if a somebody is only browsing.

In your case, you have a couple of options to do this before a user signup/login happens:
  • Setup a common user, hardcode it in your mobile app and use that to fetch data required for browsing. (Same as single free account that you suggested)
  • Establish implicit login till a user decides to signup/login. (anonymous users that you were thinking of)

You will have to remember to disable bidding/buying functionality when a common user/implicit user is logged in. And establish a proper account for every user that decides to bid/buy.

What you have to remember is, every user created (implicit, explicit OR registered, anonymous) is counted in to active users for billing purposes.

You can see the billing plans here and here.

Regards,
Wani
Kinvey Support


Thanks for detailed explanation. If I have a hard coded user used for browsing will Kinvey treat it as one user or will you have ability to track these hard coded users and charge?

Kinvey can track usage that way, but doesn't do that.


An active user is defined any user that makes API requests during that month. So, you will be charged for active users (registered users that access the app during that month + one hard-coded user).



Regards,

Wani

Awesome...thanks
Login or Signup to post a comment
More topics in General Discussion
See all 316 topics