What you pay for - and what you don't
  • 21 Dec 2023
  • 2 Minutes to read
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What you pay for - and what you don't

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Article summary

This is what you pay for:

We count every time a page is rendered, and this happens every time a new page is cached, an existing page is recached, or a bot requests an uncached page from your domain. 
This is what you pay for.

The number of pages you have and the frequency at which you recache them are the main factors determining your number of renders. For example: if you have 1,000 URLs being rendered every day, at the end of the billing cycle, you will have 30,000 renders.


You don't have to worry about your business expanding. You can have as many domains as you want under one single account, and we provide tools to render only the pages that matter, enabling you to control your usage and costs.


Other factors that influence your total number of renders are:


Keeping your cache up to date is important as your business and content change. So we offer the possibility to recache pages on-demand or set a recache period after which all pages are automatically recached. 


As you know by now, Prerender serves two different purposes: caching and rendering your pages.


The caching process stores the raw HTML rendered from the pages. 


The rendering process occurs in the cases of new caches, re-caches, and cases of crawler or on-demand requests made for error pages.


For the rendering process, Prerender acts similarly to a browser, as it performs the following actions:

  1. Fires up
  2. Requests the page
  3. Waits for the resources of the page to load
  4. Captures the raw HTML
  5. Caches the page

Each time the service fires up, we count a render, which means that alongside the renders coming from the 200 status codes (caches/re-caches), we will also count the renders coming from error codes such as, but not limited to:

  • 4xx
  • 3xx
  • 5xx
If a bot requests a page within your domain, regardless of the status code it returns, we will also render it.


This is why keeping your URLs in check is important, to avoid paying for renders of pages that you do not need rendered. We offer tools to help you find these pages and take action on them.



What you don't pay for


  • Computation costs: cache returns, and processing power, among others.
  • Storage costs: we do not charge for storing your cached pages.


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