Mobile Service Windows Azure windows phone 8

Question

I would like to buy a mobile service but I didn't understand what Microsoft intend for API for Unit. Are Units the amount of people that have the app in their mobile device?

What Microsoft intends for API and for Unit?

here the calculator http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/calculator/?scenario=mobile

In my case I have a company application that probably will be distributed through company hub to about 20 people.

We have also developed a desktop application that accesses to the Azure database directly like a normal network connection to a Sql Server. The database contains about thirty tables and mobile service allows access (insert, update, delete) to each table.

I don't understand if I need a base account a premium or if a free account is enough at the moment. How can I choose the best configuration for my mobile app? Can I try Azure for free, without any risk of being charged? If i use the try Azure for free and it isn't enough can I upgrade and pay for my needs?

Answer 1

Azure Mobile Service's tiers are based off of API usage. Any call into your Mobile Service (insert, update, delete, read, login, custom API) is considered an API call. So you'd need to have an idea of how many API calls you would make in a month to have an idea of how much using Mobile Services would cost you. As an example, let's say each of your 20 users makes 10,000 API calls a day (I would guess that's a bit extreme), then 20 users * 10,000 API calls * 30 days in a month = 6,000,000 API calls. For that, you would need to have either 4 Basic Units or 1 Standard Unit. Units are purchased when you need additional API calls (with each Basic unit being 1.5M and each standard being 15M per month).

Mobile Services has a free tier (500k API calls across the subscription (not an individual service)) so you can try it out free of charge. Additionally, if you haven't used it already, you get a free 20 mb database that you can use as the datastore for your Mobile Service. It's not advised to stay in Free mode once your app is in production but you should have no issues trying it out and then scaling up (scaling is super simple from the Scaling tab in your Mobile Service) once you're ready.