How is the pricing? Firebase Realtime Database is fairly expensive ($5/GB of storage per month), so it makes economic sense for developers to migrate to their own backend once they hit a certain scale. This is why third-party mobile backends are nowhere near the popularity of non-mobile backends with Google Cloud / AWS.
Do you think $0.18 per 100000 writes solves this problem?
If you're concerned about price per GB stored, Cloud Firestore will be much cheaper than Realtime Database (0.18/GiB/month). We evaluated many use cases when deciding on prices and we believe developers will be happy with the new model.
However since Cloud Firestore charges by operation, it's important to evaluate your use case when thinking about pricing. For example if you're running a fleet of IoT devices checking in a few times per second with very small payloads, you'd be doing a lot of write operations with very little storage and Cloud Firestore could be more expensive in that case.
firebase <-- presence, real-time editing, chat, in-memory things
firestore <-- things that have a save/submit button, transactional database
quick question:
So the real-time features in firestore are not ideal for real-time text editors and chats. But saving documents from firebase after to user has left is perhaps a good middle ground.
Would firestore charge read for each reader that's listening in real-time when a document is updated?
I wouldn't say the difference is exactly that clear cut. Presence is a clear example of a situation where you want to use Realtime Database over Cloud Firestore. And you're right, for something that you would otherwise do "in memory" or use memcached/redis/etc Cloud Firestore may not be the right fit.
In my experience both databases are totally appropriate for a chat app. Even though in Cloud Firestore you will pay a document write for each new chat message, that's only $1.80 for a million chat messages and you get all the rich querying from the Cloud Firestore API.
> When you listen to the results of a query, you are charged for a read each time a document in the result set is added or updated. You are also charged for a read when a document is removed from the result set because the document has changed. (In constrast, when a document is deleted, you are not charged for a read.)
Do you think $0.18 per 100000 writes solves this problem?