ArcGIS -Online and Off-the-tracks?

ArcGIS Online Pricing Released -- What's a Service Credit

JUN 14TH, 2012 | COMMENTS

ArcGIS Online has been one of the more confusing products to come out of Esri that I can recall (well besides ArcGIS Publisher). No one could really figure out what Esri wanted it to be and then it sort of went dark since late last year. In the mean time, we’ve heard rumblings about the pricing being out of wack with expectations and many smaller government users have basically told me they thought is was very unreasonable. But for most of us, we had no idea what it was going look like or cost. But now we’ve got pricing.


To me that doesn’t look bad at all. In fact I’m almost wondering if Esri is doing this at a loss given what ArcGIS Server costs. Now I do get that there is some uncertainty here with what exactly you are getting with these Service Credits. A good friend of mine compared them to “Disney Dollars” where their value can of course be changed at any time. Right now they are 1:1 to the U.S. Dollar but you still don’t really have much idea what that means. As will all Esri pricing, anything is negotiable so call your local rep and deal with them.

But that doesn’t really explain what a Service Credit is and what you get for it. Anyone have a clue? Some say it is one action of storing data in ArcGIS.com:

If that’s the case, this is a steal and you all need to be more realistic with your pricing expectations. I am quite impressed with how aggressive it is. Clearly Esri is serious about ArcGIS Online. Meanwhile, Google continues to do nothing with Google Earth Maps Builder. I guess we’ll hear more about it at Google I/O, but whatever lead they had over Esri, that’s evaporated.


We want it all... Resistance is futile?

ArcGIS Online is Not the Answer to Every Question from Directions Mag.

I am the first to admit the communications from Esri over the past year or two regarding ArcGIS Online has come down to a single idea. ArcGIS Online is the answer to every question. It addresses data silos, simplifies service publishing, makes map and app creation easy, provides great basemaps, offers free and subscription accounts, unites enterprises and more. The plenary at Esri UC seemed to reinforce this idea. Jack Dangermond’s off-hand comment during the morning session, “You don’t have to buy this, but you should” seemed to seal the vision.

But when you dig a bit deeper and talk with Esri staffers involved in user implementations, they are bit more circumspect. Further, if you fear that committing to a subscription account means you will be left to fend for yourself and burn through your first stack of credits, that’s not the case.

ArcGIS can be the answer to all questions. That is, an organization can host all its data and services in an organizational account and use them to build internal and public facing maps and apps. But, that may not be the best use of resources (aka money). I learned that for some organizations a better implementation might include a local ArcGIS Server implementation that pushes out the services. Those services can be registered with ArcGIS Online and thus be accessible and useable to those who have access (via an account or if they are public). In this implementation, credit use is very low since the local server is “doing all the work.” The credit hits are only for the communication between ArcGIS Online and the local server. This is exactly the scenario reader Kevin shared via e-mail when he suggested that ArcGIS Online may well help push sales of ArcGIS Server.

Esri has worked closely with its beta users to learn how they have implemented ArcGIS Online, the challenges they’ve faced and the solutions they’ve teased out. That information, along with internal testing, form the basis for a series of currently internal, draft docs detailing a stab at best practices.That information, while still in development, is shared with new subscriber organizations. Those organizations can also use a several week trial period where they can monitor ArcGIS Online use and how that use eats up credits.

Esri is also testing a variety of ArcGIS Online organizational implementations for different industries such as local government. The goal is to explore what types of processing are heavily used vs. lightly used and to try to find ways to manage costs. For example, it may be more efficient and less costly to create tile caches locally in ArcGIS, then upload them to ArcGIS Online instead of doing that work in the cloud.

Esri hopes to complete its initial work and formalize some of these guidance documents in the coming months. As more than one Esri staffer pointed out, so much about ArcGIS Online is new, not just the hosting in the cloud but also the subscription and credit models, that teasing out these best practices is not trivial.

ArcGIS Online pricing - what is a Service Credit worth?

Confused about AGOL pricing?  So was I.

I got on the phone with Esri today.   Here is is our Q&A:

ArcGIS Online for Organizations, Level 1 purchase gets "2500 Service Credits".  But what does that mean?

Service credits are expended when ArcGIS Online functionality is deployed.  With the final release, we are providing a dashboard for the administrator, so that they may review how the service credits are being utilized.

Here are some examples:

1)      Service Credits are not used when you upload data or services to your instance of AGOL
2)      Service Credits are not consumed when using a esri basemap service in your application
3)      Service Credits are used when ‘mash’ up a shapefile, map service, table your company/agency uses in a service
4)      Service Credits are used when you create and store a feature service
5)      Service Credits are used when you create or store a tile or geospatial data service(layer, map package)
6)      Service Credits are used when you use a geoprocessing service (i.e. …batch geocodes), others to be added
7)      Service Credits are used when you do data transfer

This info would be more useful if it read "XX [Number of] service credits are used when..."

Here are examples of AGO Credit Consumption

• Data Transfer – Data transferred out as hosted services or downloading data files
• 6 credits / 1 GB data
• Geocodes –
• 12.5 geocodes / credit
• 80 credits / 1,000 geocodes
• 100,000 geocodes / 8000 credits
• Tile & Data Storage – 1.2 credits per GB of storage per month, 14.4 credits/yr  per GB of data
• Feature service –
• 2.4 credits per 10 MB of storage per month, 28.8 credits/yr  per 10 MB
• 2880 credits/yr  for 1GB of storage
• Tile generation – 1 credit per 1000 tiles generated