Key Points

Free and Paid Tiers

• Catalyst permanently offers the development environment for free. You can work in this sandbox in all your Catalyst applications, make API calls, and use most of Catalyst features and components without setting up your payment method.
  

  Note: The development environment comes with usage and feature limitations, and must therefore be used only for development and testing purposes.

• You will only be charged for using the production environment . Once you have deployed your Catalyst application to production, you will be priced for the API calls that are made to the components of your live Catalyst application.

Payment Units

• There are two units of payment in Catalyst: Amount and Credits. Amount refers to the money in dollars that you pay after a bill is generated. Credits refer to the value points that each Catalyst operation is charged with.

• Every time you use a Catalyst resource, the operation will consume a certain number of credits. Based on the total number of credits used, your bill amount will be calculated. You can read about this in detail in Pricing Calculations.
  

Pricing Plans

• Catalyst offers two pricing plans:

  • Light User
  • Heavy User

• These pricing plans are project-specific. Therefore, the pricing plan of one project can be ‘Heavy User’ and another project be ‘Light User’ for the same user account.

• Based on your usage of Catalyst components, services, and storage in a particular project, Catalyst’s cost optimization software will automatically analyze and assign the particular project to a pricing plan.

• The differences in both the pricing plans lie in the fixed fee and usage fee. You can check the details from the Pricing page . Catalyst ensures that your project is always assigned to the most cost-optimizing plan, based on your usage.

Pricing Calculations

• The operations that you perform in your Catalyst application for a component are component calls. For example, you can insert , update , delete rows in a table in the Data Store using the APIs, or put and get key values in a cache. These operations are priced in terms of credits, and the final amount is calculated based on the credits consumed.

For example, 1 Data Store Insert operation costs 2 credits. Therefore, if you perform 1000 Data Store insert operations, you will use 2000 credits.

• Each operation type in a Catalyst component costs different amount of credits. Additionally, some components charge for storage that exceed the free limits. They are priced in terms of credits as well. You can check the latest pricing details from the Pricing documentation .

• The overall bill amount is calculated based on the total number of credits you have consumed in your Catalyst account in all your projects, the operational or storage cost of each operation in a component, and the pricing plan of each project.

• You can always check the breakdown of your usage, in terms of both credits consumed and the bill amount, from the Breakdown section in Billing in the Catalyst console.

Payment Methods and Procedures

• As mentioned earlier, you can pay for your Catalyst usage using your credit card or your PayPal account. You must set up your payment method in Catalyst before you deploy your application to the production environment from the Zoho Catalyst Payments portal. We will discuss this in detail later on in this documentation.

• You will receive one common invoice that includes the usage charges in all of your Catalyst applications.

• The invoice will be generated on the second day of every month at GMT 0 time. Your invoice will be sent to the email address you used to sign up for Catalyst. You can also add additional email recipients to send the invoice to.

General Guidelines

• You must pay your bill within 15 days of receiving the invoice. After 15 days of non-payment, the production environment of all your Catalyst applications will be blocked, and they will not be live any longer. After you clear the dues, your applications will be live again immediately.

  Note: When the production environment of a Catalyst application is blocked, the end users of that application will not be able to access or use it anymore. Therefore, ensure that you pay your bill before the due date to continue hosting your application live.

• You will not be able to remove your credit card from Catalyst or disable a payment setup while at least one of your Catalyst applications is still live. You must first disable the production environment of all your Catalyst applications before disabling your payment setup.

• You cannot disable the production environment of any of your Catalyst applications if a payment is still pending. You must pay your bill and clear the dues before disabling it.

• If you disable your payment setup, you will have to add your credit card or link your PayPal account with Catalyst again before enabling the production environment of any of your Catalyst applications.

• If the payment is not processed for reasons such as insufficient funds in your credit card, Catalyst will attempt to process the payment once every 3 days for 15 days, starting from the date the invoice was generated. If the payment processing fails every time, Catalyst will block the production environment of all your applications until you pay the bill.

• Catalyst will send email alerts for the invoice generation, payment reminders, failed transactions, and after the production environment is blocked for your applications.