Operating Costs

Base Costs

GRAX-Managed minimum requirements are a VM with 4 vCPUs and 16 GB of RAM, as well as a Postgres database server with dedicated capacity. These minimum requirements support small Salesforce orgs with 20 GB of data.

On AWS a base deploy costs $248.73 / mo for the recommended m7g.xlarge EC2 instance and Aurora Postgres Serverless:

$119.13 / mo (m7g.xlarge)
$129.60 / mo (1.5 Aurora Capacity Units)

Note that Aurora Serverless auto scales and is billed based on consumption.

On Azure a base deploy costs $384 / mo for the recommended Standard_D4s_v3 VM and an GP_Standard_D4s_v3 Azure PostgreSQL Flexible Server:

$138.24 / mo (Standard_D4s_v3)
$246.24 / mo (GP_Standard_D4s_v3)

On Heroku a base deploy costs $700 / mo for the recommended Performance L dyno and Premium 0 Heroku Postgres:

$500 / mo (Performance L dyno)
$200 / mo (Premium 0 Heroku Postgres)

Note that you may also want a Heroku Private Space which adds extra base costs.

Larger Salesforce orgs may need to use a larger VM or database to process data without issues. Therefore your final costs may vary. Please work with your cloud provider or contact GRAX Sales for help estimating the cost for the system requirements for your org.

Cloud Cost, Usage and Optimization

GRAX takes full advantage of the public cloud to support Salesforce orgs of any size and volume: automatic high availability, effortless vertical scaling, and consumption-based pricing.

GRAX proactively monitors the health of your data, alerts you to problems affecting backups. GRAX also provides one-click tools to vertically scale your VM or database when needed for GRAX-managed environments.

The only tradeoff is that your cloud costs may vary over time and are hard to predict.

We highly recommend deploying GRAX with the minimum requirements, starting backups, then reviewing your cost and usage after 30 and 60 days. After this time your Salesforce data will be fully protected and your average cloud costs will be fully understood.

If the cost of resources is deemed too high after this time, you can:

work with your cloud provider to buy reservations at a discount
work with your Salesforce admin to reduce data change volumes
work with GRAX Support to discuss deployment and product optimizations

And of course at any time you can discontinue your use of GRAX and stop all cloud resources and costs.

Cloud Providers

Amazon Estimate Calculator

A pre-configured estimate of the high-level AWS resources necessary for GRAX is available here.

All prices set by AWS are subject to change by AWS at any time, see their pricing documentation for more information. GRAX isn't responsible for changes to AWS pricing.

Azure Estimate Calculator

A pre-configured estimate of the high-level Azure resources necessary for GRAX is available here.

Self-Managed

GRAX Self-Managed supports whatever cloud architecture your company requires for security and compliance reasons. The architecture and related costs are ultimately up to you; we can only offer guidance on minimizing costs.

Never Route Storage Publicly

Never route your storage traffic external to the VPC or cloud provider. Traffic leaving the VPC crosses the NAT Gateway and incurs much higher costs; GRAX reads many Terabytes of data as it compacts and processes your datasets so this difference adds up. This includes traffic from an AWS EC2 instance to Azure storage, or any other similar mismatch in infrastructure providers.

Always Provide Cache Space

Low cache size, in both memory and disk, can lead to extremely frequent read operations from storage and thus drive up overall data transfer. In infrastructures where this incurs cost, this can become very expensive. See our technical requirements for GRAX hardware to ensure you're operating within safe limits.

FAQ

What contributes to base or static costs?

Costs that can be determined prior to usage, like the hourly cost of an EC2 instance given a 24x7x52 uptime, are considered static. These sections of the estimate aren't expected to change, regardless of GRAX features used or data processed.

What contributes to variable costs?

Many networking and storage services in the public cloud bill entirely based on usage. When it comes to GRAX's usage of RDS, S3, and NAT Gateway services, there is no exception. The estimate above includes best-attempt estimations of usage when under a typical app load. GRAX provides no guarantees as to the accuracy, in either direction, of these estimates.

There are many factors that can affect total realized costs:

Usage of specific GRAX features
Total Salesforce org Size
Turnover Rate of Salesforce Records (created + changed per hour)
Number of Files in Salesforce (each file gets downloaded and stored)
Disk and Memory Cache Sizes (/tmp + memory sizes)
Cross-Provider Storage Connections (AWS to Azure, etc. traffic bills extra)
Public vs. Private Traffic Routing (exiting VPC may incur NAT costs)