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Why are connections always the selling point for these real time services? Are they actually the most expensive thing to scale or just the most required therefore most profitable?

Edit: The surcharges for going over the limits seem a bit high. (Candle Plan: $0.25 each additional connection). Get some spike in traffic that causes 2000 visitors to your site for an hour and pay $500 lol

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Billing is based on 95th percentile usage, so you wouldn't have to pay overages if you exceed the limits for a couple hours (e.g. you got front-paged on TechCrunch, HN, or Reddit)

From https://www.firebase.com/pricing.html:

> Because we use 95th percentile billing, you won't be charged for your overages 5% of the time (about 1.5 days each month).

For context, 2000 concurrent connections would be quite a large site. If you're hitting 2000 concurrents, $500 probably wouldn't be an issue for you. It's also worth noting that Firebase employs burstable billing at the 95th percentile, so only sustained overuse within the monthly billing period will result in a surcharge.

As for why we charge for connections in general, they do tend to be the most expensive thing to scale. They're also useful as a proxy of how "big" a site is (in terms of users). They're kind of the analog to "page views" in today's world of single-page-apps that update in real-time

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