We announced the private beta for Slash GraphQL yesterday and the response from the community has been overwhelming! A few users reached out and asked about the credit system, so we created this post to provide some clarity.
As we are still testing our pricing plans for the official launch, we introduced the credit system to mimic that. For the majority of the time, each query you run will exhaust one credit. But, we know not all queries were created equal. The query that touches millions of nodes is different than the query only touches a few nodes. When you run the query in the API Explorer tab, you should see an extension shows up that tells you how much credit your query cost. To provide some perspective, all the queries are “evaluated” on a log scale, so a query that touches 10,000 nodes is only 3x as expensive as a query that touches 1 node.
In this public memo from our CEO, Manish also touched on this topic:
We introduce an idea of query cost. We can keep track of how many records were accessed or operations performed, run them by a log scale, and come up with a query cost in integers (not float, to keep things simple). Over time, we will iterate over the query cost to determine their actual dollar value. But, the messaging around the pricing should be consistent and aligned with query cost.
I recommend you to read the full memo to get the full context around Slash’s pricing model. During the private beta period, we’d love product feedback. Let us know your thoughts around this.