Get Started with Data Cloud Credit Consumption
Learning Objectives
After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:
- Explain how Data Cloud consumes credits.
- Identify strategies to reduce credit consumption.
This content only applies to customers with a Data Cloud license. Data Cloud customers whose orgs are contracted as Customer Data Platform orgs should refer to Customer Data Platform Billable Usage Calculations.
What Are Data Cloud Credits?
Data Cloud credits are digital currency that you use to pay for Data Cloud services. Data Cloud pricing is consumption-based, meaning you only spend as many credits as the services you use. You can directly impact your cost by controlling your usage. This makes Data Cloud pricing flexible for different use cases. A small company that’s just getting started with Data Cloud and has simple projects consumes far fewer credits compared to a company with large datasets and complex projects. With consumption-based pricing, it’s important to plan your usage so you don’t accidentally consume more credits than anticipated.
Depending on your use cases and add-on licenses, there are different types of credits and amounts of data storage.
Refer to Data Cloud Billable Usage Types to learn about types of credits in more detail.
What Consumes Data Cloud Credits?
You have a Data Cloud license, and you have your credits. Now what? It’s time to start using Data Cloud. Let’s see how it works.
When you use a service in Data Cloud, you generate a usage event. Usage events consume credits, and each usage event has a usage type. We can group each usage type under a consumption category.
- Connect: Connect streaming and batch data to Data Cloud. Or connect data from external systems such as Databricks and Snowflake using data federation.
- Batch Data Pipeline
- Streaming Data Pipeline
- Data Share Rows Shared (Data Out)
- Data Federation or Sharing Rows Accessed
- Batch Data Pipeline
If you’re using the Salesforce CRM connector, Marketing Cloud connector, Commerce Cloud connector, or Marketing Cloud Personalization connector to ingest data from a Salesforce org, it doesn’t consume credits.
- Harmonize and Unify: Transform, map, and unify your data in Data Cloud.
- Batch Data Transforms
- Streaming Data Transforms
- Batch Profile Unification
- Batch Data Transforms
- Analyze and Predict: Calculate insights and build inferences.
- Batch Calculated Insights
- Streaming Calculated Insights
- Inferences
- Batch Calculated Insights
- Act: Act on your data by querying for reports and dashboards or creating streaming actions.
- Data Queries
- Streaming Actions (including lookups)
- Data Queries
- Segment and Activate: Create segments and activate data to targets.
- Segment Rows Processed
- Batch Activation
- Activate DMO - Streaming
- Segment Rows Processed
- End-to-End Real Time Processing: Use your data in real time.
- Real-Time Profile & API
- Real-Time Profile & API
For example, when you ingest data through MuleSoft in an hourly batch data event, you generate a usage in the batch data pipeline usage type.
It’s important to keep in mind that features can consume credits from more than one usage type. For example, you can probably intuit that you consume credits in the Batch Data Transforms usage type when you run a batch transform. However, you might not guess that you’ll also consume credits from the Data Queries usage type when you preview a data transform.
Look for billing considerations for a feature to check what usage types the feature consumes. For example, Billing Considerations for Data Transforms.
Calculate Your Cost
Each usage type has a unit and multiplier. The unit represents how much data is considered 1 unit of usage. This is 1 million for every usage type. For Data Cloud, the multiplier represents how many credits are consumed by 1 unit of usage. Multiply this number by your usage to get the total credits consumed. Refer to the rate card linked in the Resources section for current multipliers. To calculate how many credits are consumed in a usage event, you need to know the usage type, the multiplier for the usage type, and how much data was processed.
Assume d represents the total amount of data processed, m represents the multiplier for the usage type, and u represents unit.
Credits consumed = (d/u) * m
Let’s calculate credit consumption for creating a batch calculated insight (CI) on 2 million rows of data. Set d to 2,000,000. For this example, set m to 15 and u to 1,000,000.
(2,000,000/1,000,000) * 15 = 2 * 15 = 30 credits
Credits are consumed again when the CI refreshes. We set the CI to refresh every day. By the next day, our data grew to 2,200,000 rows.
(2,200,000/1,000,000) * 15 = 2.2 * 15 = 33 credits
The calculated insight will cost more and more credits as the data grows.
Make Your Credits Count
It’s important to find ways to optimize your use of Data Cloud and accurately meet your needs with what you purchase. Here are strategies to cut back on extra usage.
- Opt for batch over streaming. Streaming processes data continuously, but consumes more credits than batch processing. If your use case isn’t time sensitive, save credits by using batch data.
- Deactivate projects that aren’t being used, such as outdated segments that are still running.
- Only bring in relevant data for your use case. For example, limit the profiles you bring in to those that were active within the last year.
- Process data less often. For example, if the use case for your calculated insight isn’t time sensitive, set it to refresh every day instead of every hour.
Look for tips for reducing credit consumption in the billing considerations for each feature.
Monitor Your Credit Usage
Use the Digital Wallet tool to review your credit usage for better budgeting. Learn more in the Salesforce Digital Wallet: Quick Look module.
You can also build reports and dig into your data deeper using tags called Data Cloud resource references. Learn more in Data Cloud Reportable Resource References.
Taking a proactive approach to credit usage is the first step in designing cost-efficient projects in Data Cloud. Now you understand how Data Cloud consumes credits and how to optimize your Data Cloud credits.