How much will your game backend actually cost?
Estimate monthly cost for PlayFab, Nakama Cloud, self-hosted Nakama, and Supercraft GSB at your scale. Numbers below are based on publicly-listed 2026 pricing; check vendor pricing pages for exact tier breaks.
Your game's profile
1005,000500,000
Distinct players who connect at least once per month.
1020020,000
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.
Estimated monthly cost
About these estimates
- PlayFab: usage-based MAU + API call pricing. Microsoft sunsetting paths considered. Numbers based on May 2026 published rates.
- Nakama Cloud (Heroic Cloud): tier-based + CCU. Free tier covers small projects.
- Self-hosted Nakama: AWS / DigitalOcean / Hetzner VPS estimates including Postgres + 2× Nakama nodes for HA.
- Supercraft GSB: published tiered pricing. Free at 100 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.