I have recently found this subpage, detailing some pricing changes in Lightship. It says that for more than 100 monthly users, Lightship will costs 0.8-1$ per month per active user:
If my AR game reached 5,000 players overnight, would I need to pay $4,100 per month regardless of whether I earn any revenue, and even if I only use AR Meshing + Shared AR?
Generally I did not find any announcement or press release regarding this pricing model so I’d be glad if you guys could explain it a little more.
Hey Tobias! I’m Joe from the Developer Relations team, super glad you reached out about this and thank you for taking a closer look at the new pricing information.
Our intention is definitely to make pricing manageable at every level of development, from early prototyping, to early success, and especially when scaling up. We’re working on updated pricing right now, and talking to developers about different use cases and how pricing should make best sense, so timing is good to be checking on this. Please check back in a few weeks and I hope to have some nice updates for you and our other devs.
We are in a similar position. We have a larger mobile game built in unity which had been under development before we integrated Niantic for certain AR aspects in April 2024, when the pricing was a different structure which made sense for free, ad supported games. Now with the new structure of around $1/MAU, it would basically make it impossible to afford to integrate into a mobile game. Is it possible that studios that started building under the old pricing structure could be grandfathered in at tiers that would allow for typical mobile game monetization and usage patterns?
Hello yes, same boat here - I can’t see how this pricing structure would work for me - i’d need to be charging users 1$+ per month -
I was planning to just try to sell my game at the lowest price tier - I know it’s unlikely anybody will buy it! but in the case that they did i’d then have to pay that whole price back to Niantic each month - so, yes that obviously doesn’t work. Anyway as you’ve said above the pricing is a work in progress. My app would only be using the meshing.
thanks -
Hi. I am too in the same situation. Have been developing a game for nearly a year now. Started before the pricing model change, and now the new model makes the entire project unfeasible. I was planning to release the game for free but that is clearly not an option anymore since the MAU fee. Are there any updates on this?
Also, is there a way to see how many MAUs your app has?
Very honest and related question: In the past, I’ve worked with Lightship for its mesh scanning and shared AR features, and I loved it. But later I needed localization capabilities and basically switched to ARCore Cloud Anchors and Geospatial Api. Looking at the current pricing of this platform, and considering that (I think) you can get more or less the same VPS features (or better) for free at the moment using a combination of ARCore Cloud Anchors and Geospatial Api, what are the reasons why you are still using Niantic instead of Google in case you only need the VPS? I’d love to know the answer because I’m sure I’m missing some very good reasons that I’d like to understand. Thank you.
I am also wondering if the pricing is final, or if it is still under discussion.
We are developing an app using private VPS, and as we are a new company and will not receive any revenue in the beginning, would you consider lowering the price in any regard, as well with having a the cost become active when reaching a certain MAU?
As this is quite a change compare to your earlier pricing model:
All Lightship services, as well as VPS, are free as long as your app has less than 50,000 monthly active users (MAU).