I’m not sure why, but for some reason it seems like we are being overcharged for our instance.
I have subscribed to the $15 instance that’s used only for development – NO hosting, no API usage, and we were still billed almost $50 for this month’s usage.
The only way that I view the app while it’s in development, is by using the preview link that generates the token that expires after x amount of minutes, so you have to click on the link to preview the site again.
Also, like I said above, there are very few hits to the Backendless API, because I’m only using an external API for this particular project. The only legit API hits would be me creating and downloading the source’s zip file periodically, and the occasional small image file being downloaded. Also, after publishing (and zipping) the project, the main page of the published site is deleted.
My application ID is: 158A7CC6-8110-427B-B195-EADE4622DF72
I thought that the entire idea about the preview link was so the customers don’t get charged for API hits while the project is in development?
Please explain
Mike
Hi Mike,
I checked your app to see where the API activity is coming from. I see there are more than a few API requests. For example, on June 3rd alone, there were more than 4000 requests:
We pulled the access log from that day, and the requests are spread out throughout the entire day, starting from 13:31:11 GMT0 till 22:26:32 GMT0. Similar activity is occurring on other days (the first spike in the chart was on May 9th, with more than 10,000 requests).
Regarding debug sessions, they last 30 minutes and are indeed designed to allow for frictionless testing and development. When a page in testing mode opens, the system assigns a cookie that we use to designate the session as “in development.” Perhaps the browser you use rejects the cookie, or the cookies are disabled. This would explain why the API calls are counted. However, by looking at the activity log, it must be some wild development sessions 
To minimize the billing for the file-related API requests, I recommend integrating a CDN: Cache and CDN Integration - Backendless REST API Documentation
Regards,
Mark
Hey @mark-piller
As usual, when the cookie expires, I re-click the “Preview” link to generate a fresh cookie every time.
If the cookie was rejected, I don’t think that we would get the time-out message shown above.
Something is screwy.
Have you seen any issues with using the Brave Browser for designing within the development environment?
Mike
Hi Mike,
I am not aware of the browser you mentioned. I know that the system works reliably with all major browsers (Chrome, Safari, Mozilla).
Regards,
Mark
