Skip to content

How Usage is Tracked in Capawesome Cloud

Understanding how your application's usage is tracked in Capawesome Cloud is essential for managing your service limits and optimizing your deployment strategy. This comprehensive guide explains the different types of usage metrics and how they're measured.

Introduction

Capawesome Cloud is a comprehensive platform for building, updating, and deploying your Capacitor apps. With Live Updates, Native Builds, and App Store Publishing, the platform provides detailed usage tracking to help you monitor your application's performance and resource consumption. The platform tracks several key metrics that directly impact your service plan and billing, ensuring transparency and predictable costs for your development team.

The tracking system is designed to provide accurate measurements while maintaining user privacy and system efficiency. By understanding these metrics, you can better plan your application's growth and optimize resource usage.

Usage Types

Capawesome Cloud tracks several key types of usage that are essential for service delivery and billing purposes.

Build Minutes

Build Minutes measure the cloud compute time used to build your native iOS and Android apps with Native Builds. This metric tracks only the active processing time when a virtual machine is building your application.

The tracking mechanism works as follows:

  • Only the time spent actively building your app on the VM is counted
  • Queue time (waiting for an available build machine) is not counted towards your limit

When your Build Minutes limit is reached, the following occurs:

  • An email notification is sent to your account
  • Builds that are currently running will not be canceled (fair overusage from our side)

This approach ensures that you're only charged for actual build processing time, not for time spent waiting in the queue, and that in-progress builds are never interrupted when you reach your limit.

Live Updates

Live Updates refer to the number of times an update is downloaded by a device using the Capawesome Live Update plugin. Each time a device downloads an update from Capawesome Cloud, it counts as one Live Update. Checking for updates without downloading does not count towards this metric.

When your Live Update limit is reached, the following occurs:

  • An email notification is sent to your account
  • No more updates can be downloaded by devices

Monthly Active Users

Monthly Active Users (MAU) is an important metric for understanding your application's reach and engagement when using Live Updates. In Capawesome Cloud, a monthly active user is defined as a unique device that has synced with the Capawesome Cloud in the current month.

The tracking mechanism works through a unique device identification system:

  • The Capawesome Live Update plugin generates a unique device ID for each installation
  • This device ID remains valid only while the app is installed on the device
  • Each unique device that syncs with Capawesome Cloud during a calendar month counts as one MAU

When your MAU limit is reached, the following occurs:

  • An email notification is sent to your account
  • No new devices can receive updates
  • Existing devices continue to receive updates normally

This approach ensures that your active user base can continue using the latest version of your app while preventing overage charges.

Storage

Storage usage refers to the total amount of space consumed by your Live Updates app bundles and related assets stored in Capawesome Cloud. This includes:

  • App bundles uploaded to the platform
  • Metadata attached to each bundle

Storage tracking is real-time and provides immediate feedback when limits are approached. When your storage limit is reached:

  • You'll receive a notification when attempting to upload a new bundle
  • Several options are available to resolve the issue:
  • Delete older bundles that are no longer needed
  • Upgrade to a plan with higher storage limits
  • Enable automatic bundle deletion features to manage storage automatically

Bandwidth

Bandwidth usage measures the total amount of data transferred between Capawesome Cloud and your application users for Live Updates. This includes:

  • Bundle downloads to user devices
  • Update synchronization traffic
  • API communication overhead

Bandwidth is measured over your billing period and helps ensure optimal performance for all users on the platform. The tracking system monitors both inbound and outbound traffic to provide comprehensive usage metrics.

Conclusion

Capawesome Cloud's usage tracking system provides transparent and accurate measurement of your application's resource consumption across Live Updates, Native Builds, and App Store Publishing. By understanding how Live Updates, Build Minutes, Monthly Active Users, storage, and bandwidth are tracked, you can make informed decisions about your service plan and optimize your application's deployment strategy.

The tracking system is designed to be fair and predictable—you're only charged for actual resource consumption, queue time doesn't count against your limits, and in-progress builds are never interrupted. The unique device identification system ensures precise MAU tracking while maintaining user privacy, and the real-time storage and bandwidth monitoring helps prevent service interruptions. With these insights, you can confidently scale your application while staying within your plan limits.

For more detailed information about usage limits and plan features, visit the Capawesome Cloud documentation.