What your backend costs, and what it could.
Enter your game's daily players and how many backend engineers you'd need. The in-house range covers those engineers and the infrastructure to keep a game up; the Lonca Cloud figure is our target price.
Any number from 1 to 10M. You can type 250k or 1.5M.
Smaller game, or not launched yet? The per-player target is set for scale. Tell us about it and we'll talk through what it would cost.
In-house
$1.34M – $2.16Ma year
2 backend engineers at $72K–$180K each, plus highly available infrastructure at $0.10–$0.15 per daily player per month.
Lonca Cloud (target)
$600Ka year
$0.05 per daily player per month, no backend hires. 55%–72% less.
The assumptions
- Backend engineers
- $6–15k a month each, or $72–180k a year. Most casual games at scale need at least two to cover scaling, failover and on-call.
- Infrastructure
- Highly available, horizontally scalable infrastructure across availability zones runs about $0.10–0.15 per daily player per month.
- Lonca Cloud
- Our target is $0.05 per daily player per month, with no backend hires. It is a target for games at scale, not a quote.
- Self-hosted
- The open-source core has no license fee. You pay for your own servers and the people who run them, which puts you closer to the in-house figures.
- Not counted
- Hiring time, the features your engineers would build instead, and the months before launch. All of them favour not building in-house.
Why it can cost less
Lonca is one modular backend, not a set of services per game. On Lonca Cloud many games share each pod, and one platform team runs it for every studio.
Today: a stack per game
Game A
Game B
Game C
Lonca: games share pods
Want the numbers for your game?
Tell us your daily players and what you run today, and we'll walk through what Lonca would cost you.
- SDKs for Unity, Godot and web games.
- Open source: Lonca Cloud or self-hosted.
- Built for casual and mobile games with live ops on day one.
- A founder answers every signup.